


Heartbeat

by Tierfal



Series: The Inside of Emptiness [4]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Demisexuality, Drama, First Dates, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-29
Updated: 2016-10-02
Packaged: 2018-08-11 22:55:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 47,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7910788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ed makes the mistake of waiting on goddamn tenterhooks for something to change – and then, naturally, something does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Abandon hope of impartiality ye who enter here: this fic is a particularly poignant example of my habit of writing to myself, about myself, to a certain extent. I'm not sure if I should call it "bad", as far as the habit goes, because it often seems to resonate with people… And so much of the point of writing, of fanfic, of all of fandom for me is to be out here saying _I know you think you're fucked up – and maybe you are, but you're a long way yet from broken, and you're definitely not alone_.
> 
> So, additional warnings/considerations – particularly in the later chapters, there's a lot of material about depression in this fic (including a bit more suicidal ideation and a variety of somewhat disturbing intrusive thoughts); emetophobic parties should proceed with caution; and there's some _very_ non-consensual physical contact. **I didn't use the AO3 warning** because I feel like it would implicate Roy because of the pairing, but that isn't the case. And that would make a big difference to me as a reader, so I figured it might change things for a lot of you as well!
> 
> As far as the song goes, the album came out back when I still had the energy to do the RP blog thing, and something about the tone of this song really captured the essence of demi!Ed for me – the resignation and the sadness and the emptiness and the loneliness all tangled up together in with an old determination.
> 
> P.S. Con fever update: I'm going to be at SacAnime on Saturday the 3rd, and then at YaoiCon the 16th through the 18th!

_And I'm yours_  
_When it rains, it pours_  
_Stay thirsty as before_  
_Don't you know that the kids aren't all—_  
_Kids aren't all right?_

– "The Kids Aren't Alright" – Fall Out Boy –

  


* * *

  


It’s not like it’s ever a surprise when Hawkeye’s right about something, because she’s Hawkeye, but in this particular case—

It’s just… weird.  Is all.  It’s weird when the worst-case scenario doesn’t unfold right at Ed’s fucking feet.

He expected it to change things.  He expected it to make Roy act—different; he expected something to _twist_ , fundamentally.  Obviously he’s not stupid enough to have been waiting for, like, significant looks, or meaningful sighs, or little heart-shaped notes tucked into his requisition forms or some shit, but… something.  He was waiting for something—a shift in the attitude; an undertone to the ordinary words.  An alteration to the established patterns of behavior, now that they both fucking know; now that it’s _there_ between them, dangling like a hanged man in the empty space, turning in the fucking wind, and even when they try not to look, they can _smell_ it, and they _know_.  It casts an unmistakable shadow on their backs, on their faces, on the ground.

At least the weather’s settled way the fuck down.

At least the only fever heat he has to worry about is the shit inside his brain.

At least he’s wrong, this time; at least he’s wrong when it _matters_ , because Roy hasn’t done a damn thing.

He put his guard up as high as it would go, like a fucking castle battlement around him, but the siege and the soldiers never came.  Nothing’s changed.  Havoc’s soppy, and Breda’s cynical, and Roy and Hawkeye stay late almost every single night talking about all the courses of action that the other generals might take, sorting through the possibilities and trying to figure out who they can count as friends.  Nothing’s changed, and sometimes Ed’s commentary comes in useful, and stone walls are so fucking heavy to hold up that he just…

He just wants to sink back into the safety of it like he did before.

Roy’s hopelessly melodramatic and incredibly incisive at turns, and Hawkeye does a lot of the mouth-twitching thing that’s basically a laugh for her, and Ed flips over requisition forms to draw diagrams to explain what he means about interconnectivity between people he’s seen in the training yards and the hallways and what they could be communicating from one department to another.  And it’s all right—for once, it’s _honestly_ all right.  Because he realizes—after the first few times he sits there with his shoulders tensed to aching, only for no danger of any kind to manifest—that Roy respects him more than Roy…

More than the other thing.

He realizes that this—the job, the life, the quest, the partnership, the input, the collaborative struggle to pull through, the same damn sense of safety and ease of companionship that Ed values so fucking _much_ these days—is more important to Roy than his own personal shit.

Hawkeye was right.

Roy’s not going to ask Ed for anything more.

It’s enough like this—it’s enough to _be_ like this; to trust each other and listen to each other and try to help each other without any ulterior motive bullshit.  Without any demands.

Right?

  


* * *

  


Al tends to spend Friday nights on the phone with Winry, having the kinds of conversations Ed would rather gouge his eardrums out with a rusty spoon than hear, so this week he tags along with Roy and Hawkeye to what Roy says is ‘their’ favorite pub.  Hawkeye says ‘they’ don’t have a favorite.  Roy says ‘they’ will not be getting an order of garlic fries as a gift from ‘their’ C.O. if ‘they’ insist on belaboring the semantics.  Hawkeye says ‘they’ are walking on rather thin ice, sir, and the water is _very_ cold, and would make ‘them’ _very_ useless, and—

Fortunately, they make it to the stupid place before Ed does any lasting damage to his ribcage trying not to laugh.

They sit down at a little round booth table near the back.  Ed’s mind drifts to research while Roy and Hawkeye discuss the ideal amount of garlic fries when there are three individuals seated at the table, since apparently it would be unseemly to order the full pound-sized portion, but two smalls wouldn’t be sufficient, and there could be violence as the supply ran low.  Ed realizes he’s doodling a complicated array on his napkin with a pen he didn’t know he had when the conversation stutters to a stop, and Roy’s leaning across Hawkeye to look at his work.

“Is that a feedback loop for perpetual combustion?” Roy asks.

Ed looks at it.  He was thinking about car engines.  This is what he gets for talking to Winry when she calls on nights that Al’s out at the university library writing papers and shit.  “I… think so.  Yeah.”

And Roy gives him—

The smile again.  _That_ smile.

The one like he’s fucking special.  Like he could be cherished and feted and praised to the ends of the goddamn planet, and it wouldn’t really sum it up.

The one that lights Ed up on the inside like a forest on fire and leaves a layer of ashen guilt on the back of his tongue and the roof of his mouth and every square centimeter of his fucking lungs.

Nobody should be looking at him like that.  He’s never done a damn fucking thing to earn it.  He’s never been worth it, and he never will be, and it just feels—

Terrifying.

Thrilling.

Backwards, flipped-over, obviously wrong.

And like a fucking _relief_.

“Excuse me,” Hawkeye says, pushing Roy—rather gently—back into his seat.  “I was promised an inadvisable quantity of garlic fries.”

“So you were,” Roy says, and he slings himself up off of the bench seat and away from the table with more grace than anybody has any right to have in a place like this.  “Can I get either of you something to drink?”

“Water, please,” Hawkeye says.

Ed bites back _Cyanide_.  Where the fuck does this shit even come from in his head sometimes?  “Yeah, that’d—thanks.”

Roy reaches down to pat Hayate, who’s standing guard just next to their table, and saunters off.  Ed painstakingly evens out some of the lines on the array on his napkin instead of looking at his C.O.’s purportedly very highly-rated ass.  If he could’ve had one wish granted these last few weeks, unhearing the entire long and detailed conversation two of the secretaries were having about Roy’s musculature in the queue at the sandwich shop would’ve been close to the top of the list.

“So,” he says, glancing over at Hawkeye when it’s probably safe to raise his gaze from the tabletop.  “How long has the drinking thing been going on?”

She presses her lips together, and the last traces of mirth go out of her eyes.  Fuck.  There isn’t a whole lot in the stupid world sadder than that.

“That’s an interesting question,” she says.  “I don’t know the answer to it.  It’s been several months now since it started to be so pronounced that I couldn’t help paying attention.”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  He’s not really sure what else you’re supposed to say about shit like this.  It’s like how people used to tell him they were sorry that his mom was dead.  Like… yeah?  Thanks or whatever?  He was _sorry_ too.  His feelings were a whole lot bigger than fucking _sorriness_ , and a half-assed apology before they moved back on to their functional, filled-up little lives wasn’t going to fix a goddamn thing.

“Edward,” she says, and there’s a note in her voice that just—stills him.  “This… might be a foolish thing to say, and it might be unfair, but… perhaps you’ll indulge me.”  She looks at him.  Her eyes look darker than Roy’s, some days—cold and fucking empty like starless skies and all the unmet possibilities.  “Promise me you won’t.”

He swallows.  “Won’t what?”

“Drink,” she says.  Her mouth twists, bitterly like he’s never seen.  “Most alchemists seem to be—prone to it.  Susceptible.”

She doesn’t say _weak_.

And he remembers, in that instant, that her father was the one who figured out flame alchemy in the first place—that she was alone except for him until Roy came along; and then alone again except for Roy after her father died.  There’s Rebecca; she must have other friends, but the only people she’s ever _relied_ on are men who were brilliant and ambitious and destructive and…

Roy returns with a tray, upon which stand a huge basket of garlic fries, three glasses of water, and a bottle of wine.  The tray’s balanced expertly, weight distributed on one hand spread wide; the low light gleams just slightly on the thick white scar across the back.  The fingers of Roy’s other hand curl loosely around the stem of a large wineglass.

“I promise,” Ed says, because _I’m sorry_ is never going to be enough.

“Promise what?” Roy asks, smoothly setting the tray on the table and sliding in on Hawkeye’s other side.

“That he won’t eat any of my rightful share of the fries,” Hawkeye says.  “I expect the same courtesy from you.”

“You can’t ask him that before he’s tried them,” Roy says.  “He doesn’t understand what he’s sacrificed.”

“I think I’ll live,” Ed says.

Roy picks up the basket and reaches across the table to wave it just once under Ed’s nose.

It smells like fucking _heaven_.  Garlic heaven.  With oil and potatoes and oregano and fucking _perfection_.  Which would be exactly what heaven should smell like if it existed outside of pub food.

“Holy shit,” Ed says.

“Precisely,” Roy says, more than a touch smugly.  “I think you should have free reign to rescind that promise at this point.”

“You are a terrible influence, Roy,” Hawkeye says.

“I try,” Roy says, and this time he’s not even pretending not to be smug.

  


* * *

  


The garlic fries taste even better than they smell.  The burgers are almost as good, and the bar doesn’t even get all that crowded or loud even though it’s a Friday night.  Ed never wants to leave this fucking place.  Maybe they can designate a closet for him to sleep in or something.  He’d be honored to eat all of the leftover food every night.

Al’d probably be miffed, though.  Plus he definitely can’t afford to pay their rent all by himself.

“I think perhaps there’s a special circle of hell,” Hawkeye says, looking at her hands, “where you spend your whole afterlife wandering around covered in grease.”

Roy snorts.  “ _Sexy_.”

She elbows him, not lightly.  He almost spills the latest glass of wine, but then he rights his glass and scoots off of the bench so that she can get up and stride off towards the restrooms to wash her hands.

Roy sits back down, sighing contentedly, and Ed…

Ed is trying so, so fucking hard not to be—

Afraid.

That’s what it is, isn’t it?  He’s fucking _scared_.  He’s fucking scared that Roy’s going to turn the tables now that they’re alone—that he _does_ want more; and that he knows, now, that there’s something in Ed that kind of wants to give it to him, but that Ed just doesn’t fucking know how, and it’s so much fucking safer to leave it be than to try to fumble around for handholds on a cliff he’s never climbed—

Roy puts his glass down on the table and looks at it, running just the tip of his tongue over his upper lip.

Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, _fuck_.

Ed’s heartbeat pulses in his throat, in his ears, in his stomach, in his fingertips.

“Edward,” Roy says, looking at him sideways with a thin, almost cautious sort of smile, “could I take you out to dinner sometime?”

It’s getting hard to tell if that sound is Ed’s heart beating, or if it’s fucking gunshots.

“You just did,” Ed says.  “Or is this your way of saying you’re not paying after all?”

Roy gives him the Sardonic Eyebrow.  “I meant just the two of us.  As a date.”

Definitely gunshots.  Maybe fucking mortar shells.

It’s a wonder he’s not fucking shaking; he can _feel_ himself coming apart.  “Why the fuck would you want to do that?”

The Sardonic Eyebrow drops swiftly and vanishes unmourned.  “What do you mean, ‘why’?”

“I mean,” Ed says, and he has to bolster himself with the brashness of the bravado; it’s always worked; it’s _always_ gotten him through; “you know I’m not gonna put out, so what the fuck is the point?”

Roy stares at him for a long, long, long fucking second, and the tremor of his heartbeat just keeps ricocheting around his chest.  He has to focus on breathing, which is a huge disadvantage in a game this hard.  Even drunk, Roy Mustang’s a more formidable opponent than just about anybody he can think of, except for Al, a—

“It is unspeakably sad,” Roy says, “that our society has convinced you that sexual engagement is the solitary purpose of a relationship.”

“It has nothing to do with society,” Ed says.  “It’s evolution.”

The Sardonic Eyebrow is back, and it brought its twin brother this time.

“You may have noticed,” Roy says, “that you and I are not especially reproductively viable in the first place.”

Ed opens his mouth, finds it dryer than any sun-baked ruin he’s ever crawled across, and shuts it again.  He attempts to swallow and mostly succeeds on the second try.

“But it’s about—like—long-term—mating c-compatibility, and—”

Roy shifts back in his seat, holding up both hands and lowering his eyes.

“Never mind,” he says.  “I’m sorry; I never should have—I’m sorry.  Forget it.  Please don’t feel—I’m sorry.  That was stupid.”

There’s a strange sort of tightness to his face, like he’s holding something up and holding something in.

Swallowing just keeps getting fucking harder.  Maybe Ed was allergic to something in those goddamn fries.

“Besides,” he says.  “Wouldn’t it—fuck up your reputation to be seen out with a guy?”

Roy’s eyes dart back towards him, and Ed fights the urge to flinch.  They’re just so fucking— _smart_ , so fucking _interesting_ , and he just—

Wants to know what else is behind them, sometimes.  He can’t help it.  He’s always been too fucking curious for his own good.  It’s gotten him burned a hundred-thousand times.

“Unless you felt inclined to throw yourself across the table and put your tongue into my mouth,” Roy says, and that does not even fucking compute, except for a tiny part of Ed that almost, _almost_ thinks it’d be an experiment worth trying once— “I don’t suppose most people would even notice.  The public can be remarkably shortsighted when it comes to what’s in front of them that they haven’t normalized.”

Over the ambient noise, there’s a sound like a metal sphere falling onto marble in Ed’s brain—a clear, bright, deafeningly distinct sort of _ping_.

“You’ve got three seconds to rephrase the fuck outta that before I change my mind,” he says.

Roy grins with a flash of teeth like a leopard on the hunt.  “If you have to change your mind to say ‘no’,” he says, “is that a ‘yes’ by default?”

No more bullets in Ed’s ribcage: just a fucking jackhammer, and his sternum doesn’t stand a chance.  “I—”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Roy says, so emphatically that Ed startles harder.  Roy applies one elegant hand to pinching the bridge of his nose and waves sort of vaguely at the too-small space between them with the other.  “Sorry.  I’m sorry.  _God_ , I shouldn’t have… shit.  Ed—I’m not trying to trap you.  I swear I’m not.  It’s just—instinct.  This is how I play the game with other people, but it shouldn’t _be_ a game with you; you’re not a toy; you’re so much more than… I’m sorry.  I am.  I shouldn’t have said a damn thing.  I’m sorry.”

Ed—

Can’t stop thinking—

About the blissed-out fucking expression on Al’s face when he came back after his first real date with Winry.

About how they’re obviously into all that… other shit, sure; but that’s relatively occasional, in the larger timeline.  About how most of it is conversations, and laughing a lot, and the really light little touches, and the constant brightness in Al’s eyes.

About how fucking happy they are.

“How about—this,” he says, slowly, so the words don’t tangle up.  “How about if… you don’t drink any fucking booze for two full weeks—starting now; this doesn’t count—then… yeah.  I mean, we could try.  Once.”

Roy looks at him.

And he looks back, and he’s probably going to die from the internal bleeding from the way his heart’s been throwing itself around his whole fucking body over the last five minutes, but maybe if he doesn’t, then…

Then maybe he’ll get to see Roy’s eyes crinkle up at the corners and ignite like this a couple more times.

“That is so absolutely you,” Roy says.

“Good,” Ed says.  “I was worried I’d turned into somebody else.  What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know where I’d be without you,” Roy says.

“Probably right fucking here,” Ed says, “only drunker.”

“Probably,” Roy says, fake-thoughtfully.  “I don’t know who I’d be either, at this point.”

He’s way too damn honest when he’s like this.

“Probably still dumbass fucking you,” Ed says.  “Only drunker again.”

“Harsh,” Roy says.

Ed makes a point of shrugging.

The show of nonchalance tears his eyes away from Roy for a second, though, which is how he notices that Hawkeye’s standing right in front of the table.  He has no fucking clue how long she’s _been_ standing right in front of the table, listening to the pair of them being incredibly fucking dense.

“Ah,” she says.  “Shall I come back?”

“No, no,” Roy says before Ed can unknot his tongue.  “Ah… by all means.”

He has to slide off of the bench to open up her seat again, which he offers to her with a surprisingly steady sweep of his hand.

Ed needs to—

Not pay as much attention to Roy’s hands.  Probably.  Just as a guideline or something.

Hawkeye settles in her spot next to Ed again, and she gives him a significant look—one he wishes he didn’t recognize so fucking well.

This is the tried and tested _Are you okay?_ that she’s been shooting him embarrassingly often over the last couple of months.

He’s got to start fighting his own fucking battles here.

So he forces a smile and a slight nod and points at the bar before Roy can sit back down.

“I thought you were gonna pay,” he says.

“I thought you were going to be civilized,” Roy says, dropping onto the bench.  “Perhaps we’ll both be disappointed.”

“Would you like me to chip in, sir?” Hawkeye asks calmly.

“No,” Roy says.  He follows it up with a deep sigh and heaves himself back up to his feet.  “I’ll get it.  You had to suffer my miserable company, after all.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘miserable’,” Ed says.  “Maybe, like, ‘mediocre’.”

“‘Mildly trying’,” Hawkeye says.

Roy scowls at both of them, and they both beam back.

“Next time I’m ordering caviar,” Roy says, “and leaving you two with the bill.”

“We know where you live,” Ed says.

“And how to get into your bank account,” Hawkeye says.

Roy throws his hands up and stalks off towards the bar.

Hawkeye turns to Ed, eyes softening instantaneously.  “You’re really—”

“I’m fine,” he says, and this time he kind of even means it.

  


* * *

  


The first thing Ed notices when he lets himself into their apartment is that Al’s textbooks seem to be multiplying.  He vaguely remembers a pile of them on the coffee table a few nights ago, but at this point, it’s expanded in an amoebic kind of sprawl over the entire tabletop, across the gap of floor to the couch, and all over one of the cushions.  Al’s curled up on the other one, sitting cross-legged with a huge book in his lap, a mug of something steaming-hot in one hand, and an expression of grim determination fixed on his features.

Al’s gaze flicks up when the door opens, though, and his whole perfect face lights up like the night sky from a country hill—way out past all of this smoggy shit that dulls the endless spill of stars to just a scattering.

“Hey, Brother,” he says.  “How was your night?”

Ed assesses his options spatially and determines with a quick calculation that the most efficient space to clear for his ass is the edge of the table, where he only has to move two books three inches each.

He sits.

“I think I’m going on a date with Mustang,” he says.

Al goes very, very still with the mug of presumably-tea raised most of the way to his mouth—a mouth which, for the record, is currently hanging half-open.

The silence is prickly.  It’s funny how individual silences all feel a little different.

“In two weeks,” Ed says, trying to be helpful.  “Not, like, right now.”

“Can you contextualize?” Al asks.  “You… what happened?  You— _want_ to?”

“He asked,” Ed says.  “And—I mean—sort of.  Yeah.  I think so.  Maybe.”

Al blinks.  “Maybe?”

“Well—” Ed reaches up to rake his hand through his bangs and gets that awkward-stupid shoulder-bar resistance from the structure of the dumbass uniform.  “Hang on, I can’t talk about this when I’m dressed like a moron.”

“You mean like a soldier of the Amestrian military?” Al asks as Ed gets up.

Ed unhooks the calvary skirt and slings it onto the coatrack, because… whatever.  “That’s what I said.”

“Right,” Al says as Ed ditches the jacket, too.  “So—General Mustang asked you out on a date.”

Ed itches at his scalp where the ponytail’s been pulling.  “Yeah.”

Al is watching him closely as he kicks off his boots, circles back, and sits down on the table again.  “And… you want to go.  Maybe.  Sort of.”

“Maybe,” Ed says, bringing his right knee up and bracing his heel on the edge of the table, the better to balance his elbow on his knee and his chin on his hand.  “Sort of.”

“You’re not freaking out,” Al says slowly.  “That’s a good sign.”

Ed rubs his forehead.  “Yeah, it’s kind of weird, right?  I think I’m too tired to freak out.”

“I’ll take it,” Al says.

The good news is, forehead-rubbing transitions really smoothly into forehead-smacking.  “Fuck.  Winry’s gonna be so smug.”

“No, she’s not,” Al says.  “She’ll be happy for you.”

“Happy and _smug_.”

“Maybe the tiniest bit,” Al says.  “But from a place of love.  Brother, are you sure?”

“Sure what?” he asks.

“That that’s what you want,” Al says.  “Not what you feel is expected of you, because it’s what somebody else might do in your place.”

Ed shifts both feet back onto the floor—or, to be more honest than he’d fucking like, lets them dangle, since they don’t quite reach—and knits his hands up in his lap.  He looks at the way his fingers line up, alternating flesh and metal.

“I think,” he says, sorting through the weird, half-numb muddle of emotions shifting around in the back of his brain, “that I at least want to give it a try.  I mean, I—dunno.  I like… talking to him.  Mostly.  Sometimes it makes me fucking nervous, but not, like, crawly-guts nervous.  Okay-nervous.  I think.”  It’s a really good thing it’s sort of too late for Al to disown him, and also that it’d make the rent situation too complicated even if Al tried it.  He scrubs at his face with the softer hand.  “And I guess I just sort of… want to get… control of it.  If that’s possible.  The weird shit—” He gestures to his chest, his guts, his… whatever.  “—that I—feel sometimes, depending on how much of an asshole he’s being at any given time.  I just sort of—I mean, this is a scientific venue for testing that, right?  Data collection.”

“Dating for data,” Al says faintly.  “Brother, I love you.”

“You, too,” Ed says, knee-jerk automatic.  “Is that weird?”

“Yes,” Al says.  “Which is what’s so great about it.  And I think that’s a fine idea—testing the waters to see what you think before you really jump in.”  His face softens a little, and then he smiles.  “And I really do think he’ll… be mindful.  You know.”

He knows Al doesn’t mean it in a bad w way—but it knifes through the center of him all the same.  “Of what a freak I am, you mean?”

“ _No_ ,” Al says, scowling instantly.  “Of your completely reasonable lack of experience, and of the particulars of your emotional approach.”

“Of what a freak I am, you mean,” Ed says.

Al rolls his eyes.  “Quit putting words in my mouth.  What I mean is that he _knows_ , all right?  And—based on how long he’s been so close with Captain Hawkeye—I’m willing to bet he’ll know exactly how to make you feel comfortable.  And that’s _great_ , Ed.  Because your first date is supposed to be okay-nervous and exciting—it’s supposed to be safe.  And you’ll be safe with him.  That’s not a reflection on you being a ‘freak’, or on him, or on anyone.  It’s just a convergence of factors that makes me really optimistic about your date data.  That’s all.”

“I shouldn’t have said that,” Ed says.  “It’s going to be your catchphrase now.”

“Too darned late,” Al says, with more than a touch of delight.

  


* * *

  


Somehow the weekend simultaneously crawls and breezes by.  Ed musters a bit of scientific curiosity about that phenomenon; is there any way of tracking the purely psychological concept of the variability of the progress of time based on the emotions of the observer, or…?

Sunday night duly arrives.  Sleep duly eludes him, because he’s duly unable to avoid thinking about Roy.

The duly part is the bitch of a fucking kicker.  He _knew_ this was going to happen.  He deliberately spent half of the day today reading complex fucking theory to try to cram some knowledge he’d have to unpack later into his brain, specifically in the hopes of having _anything_ to contemplate but Roy.

Except here he is, sprawled out in bed, eyes wide open, automail aching just enough to ward off the sleepiness while his brain whirrs and churns and meddles with the memories again and again and again.

It’s so fucking hard to tell what’s just scientific curiosity and what he actually _wants_.

Fucking garlic fries.  Fucking gleams of oil on the pads of Roy’s fingertips; at the corner of his mouth—

Does he _want_ Roy to kiss him?  Or does he just want to know what kissing’s _like_?

He rolls over and buries his face in the pillow.  Only six and a half more hours before it’d be acceptable to get up.

The question’s actually more complicated than what he _wants_ —or at least than what he wants in a physical, somatic-response kind of way.  Some part of him that affects the temperature beneath his skin and somehow spurs a roil of heat in the pit of his stomach definitely _wants_ Roy—wants him close; wants him unreasonably close; wants his hands and his lips and that particular spark in his dark eyes when the lashes swoop low.  But Ed can’t tell yet if he _likes_ that—if it’s a good thing; if it makes him feel good; if he enjoys it; if it’s pleasant in the long run—or if it’s just another way of suffering.  Maybe the torture has just—transformed, right?  Metamorphosed.  Deepened.  Redoubled.  Evolved.

Maybe if Roy actually touches him, he’ll hate it.

And that wouldn’t be—well, “fair” is stupid, but it wouldn’t be _right_.  It wouldn’t be a decent thing to do to someone, let alone someone like Roy, who Ed’s starting to suspect is a hundred times lonelier than he’d ever fucking admit.  You can’t set somebody up with an expectation that they’ll get all of the nice, normal things that they’d anticipate on any stupid fucking date, then whip the rug out from underneath them the instant that they lay their hands on you, and you discover that it’s _horrible_ —

Part of him—probably the haywire-temperatures part—keeps insisting that it wouldn’t be.  Part of him keeps sighing so softly he can barely hear it in his own head; keeps groaning even softer still—part of him keeps craving it; part of him is slave to sensations he hasn’t ever felt before; part of him is rooted in an absolute conviction that this is _good_ , and it’s only going to get better.

But what if that’s just the echoes of the stories they’ve been telling him his whole fucking life?

He isn’t like the people in those stories.  He knows that.  He’s known that for a long time, but he tried to pretend—so he wouldn’t scare anybody off; so they’d all have something in common.  There’s something almost—inhuman—about it, right?  Not wanting to procreate.  That’s a cold thing, isn’t it?  That makes you cold; that makes you distant; that makes you think you’re pure, but all it really means is that you’ll never mesh with other people right, because they all have this warmth inside them that you don’t.

You can’t make it exist.  He’s tried that, too.

But it’s all fucking muddled in his head—as well as in his stupid fucking guts, apparently—because he knows, too, that he feels _something_ unusual when it comes to Roy.  When he summons up an image of the stupid bastard’s face, there’s more to it than the little flickers of friend-endorphins; there’s more than just the flares of protective impulses he gets for Al and Winry and pretty much everyone he cares about.  There’s more than the gentle little settling sense of relief that he gets when he thinks of Hawkeye, because she makes him feel so safeall the time.  All that shit is there, yeah—but that’s not all that there _is_.

Unknown variables.  That’s what it comes down to.  So in a way, the whole running joke is absolutely right—he needs more fucking data, and the only way that he can get it is by going on this date.

Shit.

He rolls onto his back, then back around onto his front, then tries to bang his face against the pillow as if it was a wall, which neither works nor makes him feel any better.

Fuck all of this shit.

Maybe if he pretends to feel sick, Al’ll let him have enough cold medicine to knock himself out, right?  He should start practicing a fake cough.  Maybe he can just never go in to the office again.  That’ll totally fucking fly.

He shifts onto his back again and lays his left hand over his eyes.  He’s probably down to six more hours now.

  


* * *

  


If there’s one thing he’s learned over the years—and one thing Roy hasn’t, at least as it pertains to paperwork—it’s that delaying the inevitable only prolongs the fucking misery, and the only person you’re hurting is yourself.  It’s a long-ass shot away from _wanting_ to go in, obviously, but it’s enough to propel his ass out the door and over to HQ, so that’s something.

Mondays are usually pretty quiet for the first hour or so; no one’s caffeine has kicked in to wake them up properly, and Roy tends to stroll in closer to nine after checking in with a lot of his friends-slash-informants in other departments on his way up.  All of that is ordinary enough, and Ed’s trying with all his fucking might to fucking relax as eight thirty creeps by, and then eight forty-five, and then—

It’s only when the familiar cadence of Roy’s footsteps proceeds down the hall towards the door that it occurs to him, in an instantaneous wash of sheer fucking terror, that he can’t remember how he normally acts when Roy walks in of a morning.

Obviously, because all of them are lazy, too-comfortable, borderline-insubordinate shits, nobody ever leaps out of their chair and salutes, but—what the fuck does Ed do most days?  Of course he doesn’t chirp “Good to see you, sir!” and beam a fucking smile, but does he look up?  Does he say _anything_?  Does he nod acknowledgment, or grind out a reluctant “Hi”?  If he alters his habits now, someone could notice the anomaly in his behavioral patterns and know something’s—maybe not amiss, per se, but different; someone could notice that something’s _different_ , and—

The door opens, and he keeps right on staring too-intently at his stupid fucking paperwork while a chilly little bead of sweat winds down the back of his worthless neck.

“Good morning,” Roy says, presumably to the entire assembled company rather than specifically to him, but from this angle he can’t be sure.

“Whoa,” Breda says.  “You got a date this weekend, General?”

Roy’s steps click crisply past the table without faltering once.  “Why do you say that?”

“Because that’s your ‘Thank God there’s something in this lousy world to look forward to’ face,” Breda says.

“There’s lots of stuff to look forward to,” Havoc says.

“Maybe if you’re the living embodiment of a puppy,” Breda says.

“I think that’s a bit unfair to Hayate,” Roy says, and his voice comes from further down, accompanied by a rustle—Ed sneaks a glance; he’s scratching under the dog’s chin, and Hawkeye appears to be resisting the urge to roll her eyes.  “I’m sure he didn’t mean any offense.”

“Jeez,” Havoc says.  “Is it Friday yet?”

“He’s going to be insufferable on Friday,” Breda says, sitting back in his chair and waving his pencil like a conductor’s baton.  “He hasn’t been on a date in years.”

“Ninety-seven weeks,” Falman says.  “If I remember right.”

Fuery’s eyes would probably look huge right now even without the magnification effect from the glasses.  “You always remember right.  But it can’t have been that long.”

As Roy stands, there’s a second where he looks like he’s been sucking lemons before he clears the emotion off his face.

“Information-dates with the girls from his mom’s place don’t count,” Breda says.  “Sounds about right to me.  So who’s the lucky lady, General?”

“Work,” Roy says.  “We’re married, as you might have noticed.  And if you don’t start doing yours, there will be consequences.”

He sweeps right on into his office without looking at Ed even once.

So that’s… good.  Probably.  At the very least, nobody said anything, and nobody seems to know.

  


* * *

  


As the week drags on, Roy seems to strive just as hard as Ed does to play this normal.  Is he trying to hide it from Hawkeye?  Is that the game?  That’d be a stupid game if it is, because it’s already painfully obvious to her that _something_ happened, and it’s only a matter of time before she figures it out even if neither of them spills the fucking beans.

Which doesn’t justify Ed being stupid enough to make it agonizingly clear, like he’s doing by Friday night, when he can’t stop looking at Roy’s hands twirling a pen while the three of them shoot the shit about the ambiguous intel that Roy’s contacts have turned up.  Ed always gets sort of stupid by the end of the week, because he’s _tired_ , and it’s harder to keep his head in order, but this is pretty much an all-new record fucking low.

It’s just that Roy’s hands are one of the most confusing parts of this whole fucking equation, and motion draws the eye, and he can’t quite stop himself from staring as the pen whirls around and flips over Roy’s knuckles and grazes the thick white scars on the backs of his hands and generally fucking mesmerizes Ed’s stupid fucking brain.

“Hmm,” Hawkeye says the next time Roy pauses for breath in a long treatise about something strategic that Ed should probably have been paying attention to.  “Will you excuse me for a moment while I go get a knife?”

Roy’s hands fumble the pen, and it clatters to the tabletop.  “I beg your pardon?”

“A knife,” Hawkeye says.  “To cut through the sexual tension.”

Roy’s hands go completely still—like every part of Ed’s body except for his blood, which surges through his veins at an unholy speed and rushes even faster to fill his face.

“Ah,” Roy says, delicately.  “Well—”

“I don’t _mind_ ,” Hawkeye says.  “For heaven’s sake, I think it’s—nice, actually.  It’s nice, and I’m glad.  But the pair of you are hilariously bad at hiding it, and the ongoing effort is just getting in the way of everything else.  Is it a week from now that you’re going out?”

Somehow Ed musters the nerve to glance at Roy, who is—unsurprisingly, somehow—glancing right back.

“How’s next Saturday?” Roy asks.

Ed’s heart is a thing alive—a thing contorted; a thing tormented; twisting and seizing and somersaulting in his chest.  “I—sure.  I guess.”

Roy turns to Hawkeye.  “Next Saturday.”

She sighs, but she’s smiling.  “The funny thing about it is that I’ve seen you both keep bigger secrets completely under wraps.”

“Those weren’t secrets we were happy about,” Roy says.  His face falls, and his cheeks darken, and he fumbles to pick up the pen.  “That— _I’m_ happy about, at least; I hope—”

“Are you _blushing_?” bursts out of Ed out of sheer fucking wonderment even if it’s probably—all right, definitely—kind of rude.

Roy hastily covers his face with both hands.  “No,” he says, somewhat muffled by his own palms.

“Oh, Lord,” Hawkeye says.  “I think I need a drink.  Can we go get a drink?”

“Well, you can,” Roy says.  “I can’t.  That’s part of the deal.”

Every time Ed thinks they’ve collectively faceplanted on the bottom of the hole, Roy pulls out another spade and frantically starts digging.

It’s weirdly sort of entrancing, which is part of why he can’t turn his frozen tongue around any words of protest.

Hawkeye’s eyebrows are in danger of disappearing behind her bangs, never to be seen again.  “The… deal?”

“I’m going to stop talking,” Roy says, peeking past his fingers.  “Right now.”

Emphatically, he shuts his mouth.  She stares at him.  He stares back.  She looks over at Ed.

“The deal?” she says again.

Part of him wants to snag Roy’s pen and feign like it’s consuming all of his intellect so that he can’t answer the question. “Uh—I told him—if he didn’t drink for two weeks, I’d… yeah.”

Hawkeye looks at him.  Then she looks at Roy.  Then she looks at him again.

Hawkeye is smart—damn smart.  She doesn’t have Roy’s knack for reading the fine print on people without even having to try, and even if she had the instincts he does, Ed’s not sure she’d have it in her to manipulate people unless lives were on the line.

But she’s _smart_.  And she’s remembering the conversation she and Ed were having that night, and the sequence of events that followed, and she’s stacking a pair of twos together to make four.

There’s no chance she doesn’t know.

“Part of me wishes I was surprised,” she says.  “The terrible thing is, with you two, this almost makes sense.”

“I’m choosing to take that as a compliment,” Roy says.  “…somehow.”

“Good luck,” Hawkeye says calmly.  She turns to Ed again.  “And, sincerely—good luck.”

“Ouch,” Roy says.  “I’m never buying you garlic fries again.”

“Oh, no,” Hawkeye says, straightening one of the stacks of papers on the table.  “I’m crushed.  How will I ever survive this indescribable betrayal?”

Roy drapes himself dramatically back against his chair and waves a weary arm.  “I’m sure you’ll figure something out,” he tells her, and his voice says _acid_ , but his eyes say _adoration_.

Hawkeye just smiles.

  


* * *

  


And it goes—

Fine.

It goes fine.

He and Al go to the stupid bowling alley with some of Al’s stupid school friends on Saturday night, and it actually turns out to be significantly less stupid all around than Ed was expecting.  All of Al’s friends are pretty chill; and none of them try to, like, touch him or anything weird like that; and he says something snarky about taxpayer money, and everybody laughs.

He feels like he sort of—

Fits.

It’s a fucking relief.

He should’ve figured, shouldn’t he, that Al would only be friends with decent people?  Al’s good at making friends, and he tends to do it accidentally half the time, but he’s not indiscriminate about who he actually spends his time with.  He’s got less time now, what with all the sleeping and meatbag-upkeep business that has to go on.  It’s more precious to him.  And that means he has to be a little choosier about who gets his attention and when.

Somehow Ed still seems to wind up with a whopping chunk of it, which just goes to show you that Al’s not _too_ smart.

They spend Sunday morning at the library, arguing quietly until they get the Glare of Doom; and then Sunday lunchtime arguing louder at a café until the Glare of Doom possesses a new host behind the counter; and then Sunday afternoon working on theory all over the floor of the apartment and not arguing until Al suddenly realizes that he’s starving sometime after the sun goes down.

Ed lies on his back in his bed that night with his left arm folded underneath his head and thinks—

Maybe this shit can be done.

Maybe, if you play the same old worn-edged cards right—

Maybe if you’re lucky once in a while—

Maybe it doesn’t have to be so bad, and you don’t have to feel so fucking hollow.

And _maybe_ ’s a hell of a lot better than _absolutely not_.

  


* * *

  


Even the office is fine, or at least not any less-fine than he’s used to.  Calculating every single movement was apparently a greater weight on his psyche than he realized; now that it’s not a secret anymore—or not a secret from Hawkeye; the rest of the guys don’t really matter—he feels like the manacles have split, and the chains have dropped away.

Well—most of them.

“Hmm,” Breda says the instant Roy walks in.  Ed had eventually decided on glancing up and just not making any special effort to establish eye contact; that seems pretty natural for his and Roy’s business-hours rapport. “You don’t _look_ like a man who got repeatedly laid this weekend. Are you taking your time with this one?  Spinning out all of the courtship rituals?”

“Knitting them,” Roy says without breaking his stride.  “I have very long needles.  And you know exactly where I’m liable to put them if you keep speculating wildly about my personal life.”

“But that’s half the fun of this place,” Breda says.  “I’m pretty sure it was in the job description.”

“There wasn’t a job description,” Falman says.  “That’s not standard in—”

“How’s _your_ love life, Lieutenant Breda?” Hawkeye asks, voice crystal clear and delightfully fucking cold.

Breda looks at her for a long second, and then he slouches in his seat and mutters something nobody can hear.

“Hey,” Havoc says brightly.  “You want me to talk about mine?”

“ _No_ ,” everyone around the table says at once.

So that’s… gravy.

Well, it’s something, anyway.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the chapter where all the bad shit happens. Part of why it's long is because I tried to include a little of the stuff-getting-better part… and then I swear to you, on all that is fluffy and/or holy, that it gets a lot better still after this. ♥

On Thursday night, Al’s sitting on the floor in front of their coffee table at home working on a love letter to Winry—the phone bills were getting hilariously astronomical on both sides, and Al was stricken with guilt at the prospect that Ed was helping to fund the cost on this side, and the Atelier Garfiel was eating the expense on the other end of the line.

Meanwhile, Ed’s got a good sprawl going on the couch as he attempts to pin his attention on a book that doesn’t really deserve it.  He’d find a better one, but he doesn’t really want to get up, and the newspaper is just too… loud.  Too sensationalist.  And there’s a chance of Roy getting smeared in it.

After concluding the mushy magnum opus with an extremely dramatic sweep of his pen, Al turns to Ed—seizing the opportunity presented by how damn distracting his sign-offs are, the clever little shit; they always make Ed look up.

“Are you sure about this whole date thing?” Al asks.

Ed sort of figured it’d be this old song and dance.

It’s—nice, though.  It’s nice that Al’s worried about him.  It’s nice that Al cares.

“Yeah,” Ed says.

“Are you sure you’re sure?” Al asks.  “Because—I mean, you can change your mind, if you want.  He’ll understand.”

“If he’d ever said I _had_ to,” Ed says, “there’s no fucking way I’d be doing it.”

Al pauses.  “Good point.”  His forehead furrows again, matched by a disgustingly adorable little wrinkle to his nose.  His expressions were slightly uncanny when he first got the face back; he always seemed to be trying just a tiny bit too hard to telegraph an emotion.  “But you know that it’s your choice, right?  There’s no obligation to go just because you feel like it’s—some kind of rite of passage, or like it makes you more of an adult, or…”

Ed really didn’t want to have this conversation, and the stones ricocheting down the cold well in the pit of his stomach are why.

He leans his head back over the couch arm and closes his eyes.  “Like it’ll make me fuckin’ normal, you mean?”

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Al says, so vehemently that Ed cracks an eye open before he can stop himself.  There’s a different facial expression to go with this one—an equally adorable, screwed-up, hard-eyed, mule-stubborn frown.  “That’s why I don’t want you to talk yourself into doing anything you don’t want to.  What you want is different from what a lot of people want—but so what?  That’s fine.  That’s okay.  I just want _you_ to know it’s okay.  I want you to _feel_ okay.”

Ed takes a slow, deep breath.  Then he follows it up with a slower, deeper one.  Then he puts on a little smile, because Al is just so fucking wonderful, and that’s something worth smiling about.

“I’m fine,” he says.  “I feel fine.  It’s just that I can’t know the full range of what I do want until I create opportunities for things I might not, right?”

Al nose-wrinkles just a touch harder.  “That’s… Brother, dating isn’t supposed to be a game of psychological chicken.”

Ed tries to trot out the reckless grin.  “Since when have I ever done anything the way it’s supposed to be done?”

Al folds both arms on the couch cushion near Ed’s feet and rests his chin on them, looking over at Ed sidelong.

“Also a good point,” he says.  He smiles, lifting one hand to scrub it back through his hair, and all the pale gold strands catch the light.  “Well—if anything goes weird, you can always bail.  And if you call me, I’ll come meet you, wherever you are.  Okay?”

Ed… doesn’t like the sound of that—the sound of _if anything goes weird_.  What the hell does that mean?

But Al offered it as part of an act of generosity, so that’s how Ed’s going to have to receive it.

“Okay,” he says.  “You’re the best, you know that?”

“If you start that,” Al says, “we’re going to get into an infinite feedback loop, and you’ll never get to go on your data date at all.”

Ed makes an amendment: “You’re the best except when you say shit like ‘data date’, you know that?”

Al laughs, so the world can keep on turning.

  


* * *

  


Later, as he lies in bed with midnight creeping up, Ed’s brain keeps turning over the words.  His stomach just keeps—turning.

If anything goes weird, he can cut and fucking run.

Except he can’t—can he?  He couldn’t do that to Roy.  In those precious few unguarded fucking moments, Roy looked at him like he was a code so beautiful he put every other cipher man had ever made to shame.

Roy’s really looking forward to this.

But then that’s the fucking question, isn’t it?  Exactly what is Roy looking forward to, and what’s he looking _for_?

He knows, obviously—knows how Ed is; knows who Ed is.  And it sounds like he knows better than to think that you can trick somebody into it or train them out of it or treat them the same until they believe it—a deep part of Ed knows that with a ringing sort of certainty.  The rest of him is reassured by the fact that Hawkeye would have Roy’s balls nailed onto the corkboard in the office if he’d ever tried to pull some shit like that, so it must be true.

But Roy might want to—touch him.  Right?  At least… little stuff, almost more in the realm of gestures than actual contact.  That’s a lot of what goes on, isn’t it?  Ed’s seen way more than he’d like of the stuff Al and Winry do when they’re around each other—small things; practically unconscious; they’ll touch each other’s knees and arms, and Winry’s always fluffing Al’s hair, and he has a habit of twirling his fingers in along the part of hers that always curls at the bottom.  People on the street are constantly holding hands and grazing their fingers across the smalls of each other’s backs and shit.

That doesn’t sound so bad.  He knows—whatever Al says about his incredible powers of obliviousness and self-deception, he _knows_ —that he’s fortified his own personal boundaries into stone fucking walls over the past few years.  In the throes of that paralyzing fear of sick violation in the course of shit that other people think is ordinary—in the blind, desperate, tremulous desire to try to stave off any advances at all before they develop into something that will bring the gut-wrenching terror back—he’s compensated by pushing all of it as far away as he can manage.

He knows that’s counterproductive, if not outright dumb.  He knows nobody ever broadened their horizons by closing their eyes, and he knows that’s what science is all a-fucking- _bout_ —that it’s hypocritical on top of being hyper-sensitive or whatever.  He knows that it’s not possible to shut himself up in an airtight box where nobody will ever hurt him on accident, and that any attempt is doomed to fail, and that the effort will make the trauma all that much more acute when it inevitably crashes in.

At least he’s aware of it—that’s supposed to count for something.  At least he knows that he’s done this much of it to himself.

But that leaves him with two days—not even two days; forty-odd hours—to undo as much of it as he can.  To talk himself down so he won’t flip the fuck out and hurt Roy’s feelings in the process of trying to protect his own.

So he needs to think about it—realistically.

Roy might want to touch him.

He could handle that.  If it’s just the kind of thing Al and Winry do in public all the time, it wouldn’t be that big a deal—it wouldn’t be that big a difference.  None of the three of them have ever been too afraid of expressing affection physically—at least not historically, or anything; and for fuck’s sake, Ed had to shed some of that to be able to stand all of the up-close-and-personal automail repairs.

If Roy just touches his arms, for instance, that’d be—that’d just be normal.  The significance might be slightly different, sure, but the sensation would be familiar, so Ed just… wouldn’t care.  Yeah.  He just won’t care.  Shoulders, biceps, forearms—whatever.  Nothing loaded there.  So that will—that _would_ —be fine.  If that’s what Roy wants.  If that’s what he’s inclined to.

Hands are a little more… personal.  Is Roy going to want to hold hands or some shit?  Is that a first-date thing?  Or does it have to wait until you’ve been out with someone more than once?  This is the first time in his fucking life that Ed has wished he’d paid more attention to all of the schmoopy-swoony bullshit Al and Winry kept dumping out all over the known universe when they first started dating.  Is there a standard metric for hand-holding?  Is it expected?  Is he going to look like a cold fish or a prude or some other fucking thing?  Is he going to make _Roy_ look bad if he looks like that?  Is Roy going to look like he—what, turns people off, or something, just because Ed’s not turned _on_?

He’s… just going to have to cross that possibly-already-on-fire bridge when he comes to it.  Or maybe run the other direction when he sees the plumes of black smoke in the distance or something.  Whatever.  It’ll be fine.  He’ll manage.

So that’s okay, but what if—

What if Roy wants to get, like, _close_?

What if Roy wants to do that graze-the-hand-along-the-waist thing Winry does with Al every two seconds when he tucks his shirt in?  That might be okay.  As long as it doesn’t tickle or anything.  And as long as it’s not a surprise.  There would be two or three layers of clothes in the way anyway, so it wouldn’t even be as directly skin-to-skin as hand-to-arm or hand-to-hand or something.  That’d be fine—provided that it didn’t startle him and make him jump out of his fucking skin, which would probably send the wrong fucking message.  Maybe he should pre-game and get a little tipsy or something so that he loosens up.  Or take some cough medicine.  Or—

What if Roy wants to touch his face?

That’d… Maybe that would be okay. It doesn’t sound bad—doesn’t give him that visceral, gut-wrenching _no_ feeling—as he’s thinking about it. It’s not like it’s something you’d do for very long anyway, right? It’s not like there’s anything to _do_.  You would just sort of… brush your hand against someone’s cheek or jaw or something, purely to make a point that you like the arrangement of their features or whatever the fuck, and then that’d be that.  It’s not like someone would sit there and draw out a fucking map with their fingertip or something.   _X_ marks the fucking spot or whatever.

So probably that would be fine, too.

And everybody talks about Roy like he’s some kind of dashing, rakish sex god or some shit—well, the switchboard women do, quietly, punctuated by lots of giggling and stuff—but if there’s one thing that Ed’s really learned by now, it’s that Roy is actually a big fucking dork, and the rest of it is smoke and mirrors and swirly capes (or coats) to keep the hounds off of his trail.

And he’s been acting _especially_ dorky about this whole… thing.  It’s not unreasonable to take that as an indication that he’s more nervous than he’d ever let on, right?  There’s definitely a correlative relationship there; any more definitive conclusions would be a stretch, but maybe… Maybe he’ll be really invested in making sure that Ed’s okay.  Maybe he won’t ask for anything more than that.

But what if he does?

What if he wants to—kiss or something?

The implication Ed gets from all of the tragically inevitable but blessedly brief encounters with literature on the subject—as well as more than a few of Al’s little happy-sigh sessions—is that the whole experience is fucking transcendent and whatever shit.

But it also sounds… wet.  Sort of—slimy, maybe.  Saliva isn’t exactly high on Ed’s list of bodily fluids to distribute into other people’s mouths.  Not that he has any bodily fluids that he’s itching to dole out, but—

There it is.  There’s the sick fucking lurch of his stomach, so hard and so fast that it feels like the rest of his body’s going with it—like he’s falling straight through the mattress; straight through the bedframe; straight through the floor.  Like the sharp, sudden pull of the lead weight in the pit of his guts is going to drag him down forever.

The guys at the office would have a lot to say—and a lot of winking to do—about his _bodily fluids_.

He rolls over and buries his face in the pillow.  His right shoulder throbs a little, just for good measure.  He deserves that; he probably should’ve just swallowed his fucking pride and stood on a chair when he was putting the dishes away instead of straining it.  He should know better by now.

And he should know better than to think this thing is going to work.

Even if Roy’s careful—even if he’s a million times more considerate than anybody normal would ever expect to have to be—how fucking long is it going to last?  Even if the little stuff, and the small touches, and the rest of it isn’t too bad, there’s going to be a point where their fucking goals diverge.  There’s going to be a point where Ed, as is, as offered, is not enough.

There’s going to be a point where Roy wants shit Ed doesn’t know how to give him.  There’s going to be a point where he wants shit Ed _can’t_ give—or that he can, maybe, but that he’d fucking hate and fail at and never understand—

So what the fuck does Ed think he’s doing, pretending like it’s worth a trial flight when the whole thing is guaranteed to crash and burn?

It’s just a waste of everybody’s time.  Roy needs someone who’s on the same page—someone who can give back the same shit he’s giving; someone who has all the traits and truths and capabilities he’s looking for.

Someone who’s like him.

Someone who’s whole.

Eventually, Roy’s going to want sex.

Right?

That’s how it works—that’s how people work; that’s what people do.  Roy can talk until he’s blue in the face about compatibility and conversation and how it’s not necessary or whatever shit he wants, but the bottom line is that if it’s an impulse for the vast majority of the human race, someone who feels it is, over time, going to _miss_ it if they can’t get it from someone who doesn’t get the urge.

The thought starts out as a wisp of a whisper in Ed’s brain.

Would it be so bad?

Maybe he could fake it.

Maybe he could pretend, for Roy’s sake—for his own; for the sake of having something, having _someone_ ; for the sake of not being fucking alone all the time and banging his fists on the glass watching people on the other side going around like their lives have meaning.  And what if that’s the difference, underneath it all?  What if it really is just as fucking simple as being loved?

But that’s bullshit.  That can’t be right.  Hawkeye has more gravitas and dignity and self-assertion than anyone he’s ever met; Hawkeye is a fucking pillar.  Hawkeye doesn’t need it.  Which means it must be possible to make do and unequivocally succeed without.

Which all circles back to the same damn point:

There’s something wrong with _him_.

He’s stranded somewhere in the fucking middle between wanting all this shit, in a blurry-abstract emotional sense; and lacking the mental and physical and psychological capacity to follow through the whole way and do it _right_.

If, by some unlikely twist of chance, this whole thing works out for a while, eventually Roy’s going to start to crave that shit whether either of them likes it or not.

It’s not like it’s—a big deal.  It’s not like it’s personal.  It’s just like if Ed was a vegetarian, and Roy stopped eating meat in solidarity with him, or something—it wouldn’t be that Roy couldn’t still _like_ it; just that they couldn’t eat it _together_ , and a day would come where Roy just had such a huge, toothy, salivating fucking hankering for a good steak—

That either Ed would have to give that to him, or he’d have to get it somewhere else.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

Maybe—

Except it makes his whole fucking stomach tighten up and twist just to think about—yeah, Roy’s got nice fucking collarbones; yeah, they look good framed by the edges of his shirt, gleaming with a thin sheen of sweat; yeah, sometimes Ed’s thoughts drift to whether his ribs would flatter harsh sunlight the same fucking way—

But the thought of getting _naked_ with—

The thought of being bared to that hungry gleam that gets into his gorgeous eyes—

The thought of his hands smoothing over Ed’s skin, fingertips in places no one else has ever fucking touched, ever fucking seen—

That strikes a chord of panic in him so deep he fucking shudders with the resonation of it, and his whole body wants nothing more than to curl in tight and protective around himself.

It just—

It just sounds _bad_ , made a dozen times worse by the weight of the fucking expectation—by the ten-, the hundred-thousand tiny little comments people make every fucking day that just assume that it’s part of the human experience; that it’s part of what _makes_ you human; that carnality is a criterion for empathy and understanding, and—

The idea of someone’s hands on his—hips or his waist or his _inner fucking thigh_ sounds like fucking torture, sounds like an invitation to fucking misery, sounds like disaster, sounds like—

He tries to focus on the specificity—on the fact that it wouldn’t just be some disembodied appendages; it’d be _Roy’s_ hands.  Roy’s hands are fucking extraordinary; he knows that all too goddamn well.  And Roy would be careful—right?  Gentle and shit.  Roy would be _talented_ —if even the dimmest, blurriest impression of the rumors is to be believed, he’s like some kind of fucking miracle.

Isn’t a miracle what Ed needs?

Well.

What he needs is some goddamn sleep, but apparently that’s out of the fucking question.

He rolls onto his back again, stares up at the ceiling, and then shifts enough to glare over at the window.  Fucking cities and shit—there’s so much stupid light everywhere.  So many streetlamps; so many storefronts; so much neon.  It’s great when you’re walking around alone and would rather not feel like you’re about to get swallowed by the unfriendly fucking dark—or like it’s liable to spit out another unkillable monstrosity of claws and hate and teeth.  It’s not so great when you’re trying to get some fucking sleep, and the blinds just aren’t good enough; or when you want to remember that the universe has fucking stars.

There’s something about starlight that’s purer—colder, crisper, cleaner; the paleness of it makes it less… obtrusive.  Less demanding, somehow. Not like this artificial orange-yellow shit that trails you everywhere; clinging to the undersides of clouds when the sky’s cast over, glowing at every corner, pouring out of every window, seeping in between the slats across his window and laying stripes along the bed.

It’s been a long time since he missed home.

But he just wants all of this fucking nonsense to stop—just for a minute; just long enough for him to catch his breath.  Just long enough to reorient himself in a world that’s carried on around him so intently that it’s constantly pulling further onward and leaving him behind.  It’d be one thing if it’d just fucking abandon him and get it over with, but it keeps dragging on his skin and his hair and his clothes like little black hands—like it wants him, _expects_ him, to follow.

It’s his own damn fault, if you think about it.  He wasted all that time you’re supposed to spend learning how to live—dumped it into alchemy and arcana; filled his brain with little factoids instead of studying the patterns of human beings so that he knew how to act like one when all the quests were over.  He should’ve known.  He should’ve thought.  He should’ve realized that the world wasn’t going to change when he finally laid the biggest wrong to rest.  He should’ve realized it was still going to kick his fucking ass at every opportunity.  He should’ve realized it was never, ever going to get easier—just different.  Just differently hard.

It’s not that it’d be easier in Resembool—not that it’d be all that much better; not that _he’d_ be any better.

But it’d be quiet.  And the light wouldn’t burn from the darkness on every side.

  


* * *

  


Al’s voice shakes him from a soundless pit of fragile sleep, dragging him upward through a sticky torpor.  “Brother, you’re still here?”

Ed winches one crusty eye open and offers a pearl of exquisite wisdom: “Nngh?”

It is then that his crusty eye registers the intensity of the light in the room.

In the first instant, he knows that he’s _seriously_ fucking late.

In the second, he looks at the clock and knows exactly how seriously fucking late he is.

There are a lot of words he could say that begin with F.  The one that comes out is “ _Figures_ ”—which is somewhat surprising, given the usual usage proportions of his vocabulary, but nonetheless reasonably apt.

Al makes a tiny, disgustingly adorable little _Eep_ noise as Ed tries to fling himself out of the bed.  ‘Tries’ is the operative word: a very well-intentioned bit of momentum gets diverted by the way his automail leg tangles in the sheets and accordingly lands him spread-eagled on the floor.

“Let me help, Brother!” Al says.  “What do you need?”

Ed’s first thought is _Bacon_ , which is less bizarre than it could be, considering that his brain’s probably just given up today for lost.  Bacon certainly wouldn’t hurt matters at this point.

“Clothes,” he says when the mutinous organ in question settles the fuck down.  “Boots?  Jacket’s by the door, the—”

“On the coatrack,” Al says.  “Got it!”

A brief flurry of wild activity follows, and what follows that is Ed stumbling out the door with his hair half up—just the top layer pulled back with a band snapped around it, because there wasn’t time to navigate steel palm plates around the whole ponytail, but he’d faceplant on the sidewalk in an instant if it was free to dangle in his face.

Some people would probably reason that late is late is late, but Ed’s temporal reality doesn’t function quite like that, so even though it’s hopeless, he takes the stairs up to HQ at a run and hits the halls at a fast walk—the latter only because crashing headlong into a fucking major general at this point wouldn’t do any favors for this stupid day.

He bangs into the office sixteen minutes after eight, which is pretty impressive given that he was dead to the world until seven fifty, and his and Al’s place is a full two miles away.

Then again, being dead to the world sounds preferable to being here right now, with everybody’s fucking eyeballs on him.

“Sorry,” he blurts out, which is more difficult than he’d like with the way he’s panting from the jog.  “Overslept.”

“Whoa,” Breda says.

“Are you okay?” Fuery asks.

Ed isn’t sure who to stare back at.  Maybe he should rotate.  Everybody can have a five-second window, and then he’ll start over.

“Yeah,” he says.  “Why?”

Havoc clears his throat.  “Your…”  He makes a really ambiguous gesture around the level of his ear.  After the entirety of the allotted five seconds, Ed figures out that that’s probably supposed to be a way of indicating hair.

Apparently the world has granted him one small blessing today: Mustang’s not here to participate in the peanut gallery just yet.

“I was in a rush,” Ed says.  He glances over at Hawkeye.  “Is it, like—non-regulation, or—?”

It’s funny, in retrospect—sad-funny; sfunny?—how few fucks, aerial or otherwise, he used to give about that kind of shit.

There’s just so much more at stake now.  And so much staking him down—so much to lose; so much pinning him underneath the thousand tiny weights of the endless fucking rules.

“No,” Hawkeye says slowly.  “It’s fine.  Just—unusual, for you.”

He shuffles his feet for a second and then decides fuck this standing-here-getting-stared-at business and crosses over to drop into his regular seat.  “I can fix it later.”

Falman taps the bottom edge of a stack of papers sharply on the tabletop to align them.  “It makes you look startlingly reminiscent of several famous paintings by the seminal portrait artist Paolo Bettoni of characters from Xerxesian myth.”

It’s Ed’s turn to stare stupidly at someone, which he supposes is nice for a change.  “I—what?”

Falman blinks serenely.  “It makes you look startlingly remini—”

“I heard you,” Ed said.  “It was a surprised ‘what’.  I just left the ‘the fuck’ part off because it seemed more professional.”

The good news is, apparently he’s brilliant today.

“Aw, crap,” Havoc says.  “Does somebody have an art book?”

“Not _here_ ,” Fuery says.

“Can you draw one from memory?” Havoc asks Falman.

“Get Armstrong,” Breda says.  “He could.”

“Perhaps we can enrich Major Elric’s art history education later,” Hawkeye says, “and focus on our work for now?”

There’s a moment where they all instinctively make eye contact.  When she uses collective pronouns _and_ a rhetorical question, they’re in pretty deep shit.

“You betcha, Major Hawkeye,” Havoc says, hastily shuffling files.

“Teacher’s pet,” Breda mutters.

“Some of us,” Havoc says, “have hot fiancées to get home to, so the last thing we want is extra work as punishment for slacking off.”

Breda just looks at him, taps a pen twice, and then looks down at the form in front of him.

Ed knows that fucking feeling.  He knows _You’re my favorite person, and all I want is for you to be happy, whatever that means—but godfuckingdamn, I wish it didn’t have to be because_ your _favorite person is starting to be somebody else._

He kind of wants to say something—or maybe write a note, so that nobody ends up in the crosshairs of the Hawkeye glare for unwarranted chitchat—but his brain is foggier than fall mornings in the hills back home, and the words just won’t arrange themselves nicely in his head.

He doesn’t get a chance to fumble his way through and figure something out, because that’s the moment Roy chooses to saunter in.

“Good morni—” He glances towards Ed, and he blinks twice in rapid succession and breathes in the middle of the syllable he’d been speaking.  He manages to produce the rest of it without sounding especially perturbed, and the startlement vanishes from his face as immediately as it had arrived.  “—ng, everyone.”

Is this about the fucking hair?

Ed is never leaving it like this again.

Roy proceeds on into his office with no noticeable loss of either pomp or circumstance, so Ed tries to shake off the nagging feeling that he somehow did something _wrong_ and forces himself to think about requisition forms and shit.

It’s just—hair.

For fuck’s sake.

  


* * *

  


He keeps expecting Roy to—react.  Say something, do something.  Gaze at him in rapture, maybe.  Isn’t that what people do to demonstrate attraction?  Roy’s probably subtler than that, but he should at least be clearing his throat, or sneaking looks, or… something.

But he hasn’t.

So maybe the real reason he tripped over his greeting was because Ed’s hair looks like shit.

It’s probably just a big fucking rat’s nest mess anyway; that’s more likely.

Fucking whatever.  Ed’ll just _leave_ it that way.  Maybe people will leave him alone.

The clock hands creep towards lunchtime, and stupid-ass thoughts keep climbing the walls of Ed’s skull, and does it ever fucking stop, or do you have to die to catch a break?

He’s not sure he wants to know the answer to that.

  


* * *

  


The cafeteria has long since earned the hard-won title of _Worst Place in HQ_ , which is really saying something considering how much Ed hates this whole fucking place some days.

The cafeteria, however, goes the whole fucking way—it takes no prisoners and spares no expenses, except of course for the kinds of expenses that would purchase edible ingredients _or_ competent cooks _or_ benches that aren’t so unrelentingly uncomfortable that you just want to bolt down the shitty food and be done with it.

On second thought, maybe that sort of makes the seating an advantage.

Whatever.

The food—“food”—is, as always, _shit_.

And the crush of people’s arguably worse.

Ed ekes out an empty table end where no one’ll be bashing their elbow into his—he vaguely remembers that being less of a problem back when he could use his right hand for forks and other small-motor shit.  He needs the solitude, though, to try to use Al’s latest research notes to distract himself from the ungodly assault on his tastebuds.

He’s only just settled and smacked the notebook down next to his tray when footsteps stop on the opposite side of the table instead of continuing by.

Mother _fucker_.

More than a little grudgingly, but fucking beholden to the rules about society and behavior and chain of command and all the fucking rest, he looks up.

“Ed!” Suzy Leighton says.  Pink blooms around her cheekbones.  “I mean—Major Elric.”

“You better not call me that,” he says, making sure to smile in case his tiredness makes it sound threatening or something.  He jabs his fork towards his food for good measure.  “I’m close enough to throwing up already.”

She wrinkles her nose, but in a way that’s much more sympathetic than disgusted.  “The chicken is always… an adventure.  But—hi!  I haven’t seen you down here in a while.”

He thinks it’s probably kindest not to mention that their first encounter all those freaking years ago is most of the reason for that. “Yeah, I… mostly try to get the hell out of this place while I have the chance, y’know. But I was so late this morning I forgot to bring food _or_ cash, so…” Waving the fork could catapult adventure-chicken everywhere, so he tries to be careful in gesturing around himself with it.  “Here we are, I guess.”

“Here we are,” Suzy says.  “Hey, you, um—you mind if I sit here?”

High on the list of things he simply cannot understand—which admittedly is expanding at the same approximate rate and scope as the universe—is the way some people come to work and then _seek out_ other human beings during their only opportunities to be alone.

“Um,” he says.  “Sure, yeah.”  Language is always kind of a piece of shit, but especially when his brain is oatmeal after a night of vigorous not-sleeping.  “I mean—no, I don’t mind.”

Suzy just sort of small-talk-bulldozes right through his awkwardness, though, which he supposes counts as a good thing.  “So how’ve you been?” she asks.  She looks faintly… relieved.  Like she really wants to sit with him—or maybe really doesn’t want to sit with someone else.  “It’s been… pretty much forever.”

He’s seen her here and there and waved or said hello and stuff maybe a dozen times in the intervening years, but she’s right—they haven’t had an actual conversation since the first time.

Which is what makes it a ridiculous prospect from the get-go that they could catch up over lunch hour when they never really knew each other to start with.

Is this the sort of thing that regular people have normalized?

Fuck.

“Uh,” Ed says.  “I’ve been—okay, I guess.  Busy.  How are you?”

She smiles, sighs, and then shrugs—the latter two without losing the first, which is sort of impressive, actually.

“A little overwhelmed,” she says.  “Oh!  I got promoted!  Twice!”  She points to the markings on her shoulder and her chest, which proudly display… “Corporal now.  My mom was so excited.”

“Hey,” Ed says, forcing enthusiasm into his voice, because she deserves some.  “That’s fucking great.  Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” she says, beaming at him.  “It’s really—it’s just so cool to feel like I’m actually getting somewhere.  Like I’m actually making a difference.”

Didn’t he feel that way, once?

Wasn’t there a time in his life where all of this shit _mattered_?

Lately fucking nothing ever does.

“Yeah,” he says.  “That’s awesome.  So what’ve they got you doing now?”

“I’m in Intelligence,” she says.  She hasn’t even touched her food, which is probably the wiser choice, all things considered.  “It’s really interesting so far—there’s so much going on; it’s l—”

“What have we here?” a low voice asks, and a shadow flicks across the tabletop, and a weight slides onto the end of the bench, settling a little too close on Ed’s left—

And Suzy scrambles to jump up out of her seat and—salute?

“Sir!” she says.

Shitfuck.

Ed twists around, trying to balance the screeching panic in his animal brain with his rational sense of how weirdly his body’s weighted; maybe he can get his left leg over the side of the bench without injuring the officer who just dropped onto it next to him, and then he can sort of hop over the bench itself to get both feet on the floor, because saluting while straddling the cafeteria bench probably counts as insubordination under one clause or anoth—

“At ease,” the newcomer says—to Ed, first, and then he tilts his head just slightly to flick his gaze at Suzy.  “Please, enjoy your lunch.”

The hammering in Ed’s chest cavity doesn’t get a break, because he’s learned to make zeroing in on either the shoulder marks or the color bar an instinct.

Dude’s a colonel.

Fuck.

He’s probably a little bit older than Roy.  Ed can be a crap judge of that sort of thing, which Al attributes to him being _far too focused on the innumerable tasks at hand—and on judging yourself—to develop metrics for gauging others_ , but this guy’s got dark hair succumbing to little flecks of peppery-gray all over, and light green eyes that are seriously sharp despite the fine lines at the corners.  The beard confounds the age guess a little; it’s going whitish faster than the hair, but Ed feels like that’s sort of normal, and in any case it’s trimmed neater than HQ’s front lawns, and probably most people would say this guy is gorgeous.

He’s also way too close.

“Good afternoon,” the colonel says to Ed—again, for the record, from _way too close_.  “At least, I believe it’s afternoon.  Major Elric, isn’t that right?”

“Yeah,” Ed says in answer to… both, or something.

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Suzy sitting back down slowly, but he doesn’t want to look away from the superior officer to shoot her a reassuring glance or anything.  He’s not sure what he’d be reassuring her _about_ , anyway; it just sort of seems necessary for some reason.

“Martin Verso,” the guy says.

Ed’s brain spins.  The guy’s knee is two inches away from his—and it’s Ed’s metal one, sure, but it’s like the proximity is fucking electric; he can _feel_ it—

“Nice to meet you,” he says.  “…sir.”

The guy smiles, makes a V-shape under his chin with his index finger and his thumb, and twists both fingers together as he strokes them down along his beard.  It’s weirdly mesmerizing.

“Pleasure’s mine,” he says.  “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Ed tries to make the smile look natural.  “If that were true, you prob’ly wouldn’t want to sit near me.”

“No?” Verso asks, and his grin has this quirk in it that’s just… There’s something— “By the sound of it, you have always been a magnet for scandal, but I can handle a bit of that.”

…what?

“Oh,” Ed says, which is a step up from his initial instinct to get defensive, because—well, what the fuck?  “I guess it was kind of touch-and-go a lot when I was out on assignments more.  I mean—not that I was responsible for any, like, property damage or anything, but sometimes it sort of… _happened_.  In the course of duty.  Y’know.”

He looks over at Suzy, who’s been awfully quiet.  She’s currently sort of mushing her vegetables with the tines of her fork and spreading them around, and she glances up at him and then back down at her food.

Ed vaguely remembers the name Verso—which must mean the guy’s important.  Hazy little puzzle pieces are shifting around in his brain as some of the initial muddle of emotions subsides—Verso’s the head of something, isn’t he?  Is he Suzy’s boss?  That would explain her reaction, wouldn’t it?

Fuckin’ fantastic.  Basically confessing that he’s the uncrowned king of semi-accidental destruction to one of the people who’s kind of in charge around here while his sort-of-friend has to sit there silently sounds like _great_ lunchtime conversation.

Verso doesn’t seem bothered by it, though, which is… weird.  Normally the brass or anybody with aspirations to bronzeness turns their nose the fuck up at the likes of Ed as soon as they catch wind of his history of bending every rule he could get between his hands.

“Sometimes,” Verso says, and there’s something about this version of the smile that Ed doesn’t like, “extraordinary measures are necessary—in the course of duty, you know.”

Isn’t that… exactly what Ed just said?

“Right,” he says, which seems noncommittal enough.

“My understanding is that that’s your specialty,” Verso says.  “Going to extremes.  Doing whatever it takes.”

Verso’s knee is close enough to Ed’s now that it’s bumped against his once.  The guy has turned his whole torso towards Ed, which could be the reason for the knee-jostling shit.  He has one elbow on the table, and he just set the other hand on the bench between them, fingers splayed out so that the tip of his index finger sits a grand total of two centimeters away from the edge of Ed’s cavalry skirt.

“Um,” Ed says.  He stares at Verso’s hand for a second before realizing that that’s a really stupid idea and shifting the stare up to his own plate—which is marginally less stupid.  Unrelated to the more pressing concern of what the fuck he’s supposed to do here, the food, which was unappetizing before, looks inedible now.  “I guess so.”

He chances a glance.  Verso just keeps on smiling.  The dude’s face must hurt.  “That’s how you’ve come this far, isn’t it?  How you’ve risen so spectacularly high?”

Is he calling Ed… _tall_?

Well, shit, that changes things, doesn’t it?

“It’s not like I did it alone or anything,” Ed says.  “People’ve been really—supportive.  Mostly, for me anyway, it seems like if you’re good to people, they’re good back.”

He believes that—he does.  He has to.  Equivalent exchange; it works, doesn’t it?  If he just keeps fucking _trying_ , something’s got to go right.  It’s a sound principle, because it’s about conservation of matter and equal and opposite forces, and that shit’s just physics; you can’t fight that.  Or you can, if you want to, but you sure as shit can’t win.

Except Verso—

Laughs, kind of low, kind of deep.

“I know precisely what you mean,” he says.

That’s a fucking relief; half the time Ed feels like he’s speaking in fucking tongues these days.

“It’s like Suzy was saying,” Ed says, tipping his head towards her and shooting her a smile.  Trying to reel her back into the conversation is what Al would do, and in the rare moments when Ed’s feeling up to trying to be like Al, he sort of has to run with it.  “It’s really important to feel like all the sacrifices are paying off.”

He hopes he didn’t misrepresent what she’d been talking about, because she doesn’t exactly look thrilled that he’s drawn attention to her.  Shit.  Did he do something w—

The tug on his hair seems so incongruous that he almost bats his hand backwards towards his ear on instinct—a couple strands could’ve caught on the star-shaped pin on his shoulder, or in the wings of a big-ass fucking insect, or—

But for one reason or another, the way Suzy’s mouth sets in a line while her eyes widen makes him—

Pause.

And turn.

And realize that Verso just twirled a finger into his fucking hair.

At which point Ed’s brain just—

Quits.  It fucking quits.  His whole head echoes with the wordless roar of a white void, and he stares, fucking dumbstruck, at Colonel Verso’s face.

Verso looks—amused.  But only a little.  Like this is such a small diversion; like the blurry swathe of blue sleeve hedging the side of Ed’s vision is so completely fucking negligible; so triflingly _ordinary_ —

Is it?

Is this, like— _okay_ to people who aren’t all fucked-up-twisted inside about touching and hands and implications the way that Ed is?

He wants to look over at Suzy to use her expression as a reference point, but he can’t fucking move.  He can’t process this; he can’t understand; and if the comprehension won’t come, his stubborn-ass brain insists that they should _sit_ here, staring at the available evidence, until some kind of a conclusion surfaces from in amongst the muck.

His heart beats in his ears, and then Verso’s fingertips chase it—two of them, just the pads, soft-warm and feather-light, sweeping around the shell, so that his loose hair ripples over the man’s wrist and then slips back into place as the hand—

Withdraws.

Settles again on the bench between them.

Did that happen?

Maybe Ed fucking imagined it; maybe—

Maybe he’s getting fucking feverish from thinking so goddamn hard about Roy’s hands, and anybody who gets within two feet of him might as well be touching him; maybe he’s inventing this whole fucking scenario out of some half-baked, sleep-deprived notion of trying to _practice_ —

Or maybe, now that the idea’s in his head, he’s just so fucking desperate to get somebody’s hands all over him that he’s casting anyone that he can find into the role and letting his sick fucking mind run rampant with the thought.

Maybe this is what he wanted—maybe this is what he wanted all along, and his singular capacity for hard-headed denial shoved it behind layers and layers of stubborn refutation and swept them shut every time he tried to wonder.

Maybe he wants some stranger to…

Did he invite this?

He’s still staring stupidly into Colonel Verso’s jade-green fucking eyes.  He’s probably blinking; he’s probably breathing—but mostly he’s just staring; mostly he’s a fucking statue, crack-riven marble all the way down except the little segment of skin on his thigh that can just sense the heat of Verso’s hand _so_ close—

Their whole conversation washes back over him; the words froth up, hissing; what did he say, exactly?  What did he say that would’ve provoked—

Oh—fucking—

Everything that Verso said—all of it could have been—

But he didn’t realize—

He didn’t _mean_ —

He hears himself dragging in a rattling breath.  His mouth must’ve fallen open; he’s been staring slack-jawed like a fucking idiot all this time.  He snaps it shut, tries to swallow—tries again, and then a third time, but it sticks.  Everything feels sticky—everything feels slow and groggy and prickly and unsteady, and his whole body’s quicksand except the acid in his stomach sublimating so fast he can taste the bile in the back of his throat.

He didn’t mean for any of it to sound like—

He was just trying to have a fucking conversation; he was just trying to be polite and pass himself off as anything other than an abject social failure for once in his stupid fucking life—

“Good heavens,” Verso says, and the hand between them lifts again, and Ed’s whole body jerks backwards— _away_ —

But all Verso does is wave it gingerly in front of Ed’s face in a _Hello, anybody home?_ sort of way.

“Are you all right?” Verso asks.  “I didn’t mean to startle you.  It’s just that you have such beautiful hair; I could hardly help myself.”

Ed opens his mouth, but you can’t say _Maybe you should try not fucking touching people if you didn’t ask_ to a superior officer.  You can’t fucking say that to anyone in a supposedly-fucking-civil public setting like this; you can’t—

Do anything.

You just have to take it.

Ed chokes down the spit, and the bile, and the things he wants to sling out with all the spite he can muster.

“I—” he manages.  Not much left in him after that, all fucking told.  “Thank—you.”

“Surely I’m not the first person who’s told you that,” Verso says.  “If I am, I guarantee I’m not the first one to think it.”

Ed scrabbles around in his lungs and his brain, but neither of them yields up anything he can work with.  “Well—”

“You don’t dye it, do you?” Verso asks.  “Tell me you don’t.  You can’t possibly; look at the roots.”  He grins, like there’s nothing weird at all about gazing intently at somebody’s fucking scalp over the lunch table with your hand practically nudging up against their leg.  “Ah, but you’re an alchemist,” Verso goes on.  “You could make it terribly convincing, couldn’t you?”

What the fuck is that even supposed to mean?  “Um,” Ed says.  He chances a glance over at Suzy again; right as he turns, she looks down at the contents of her plate and starts poking them again.  “No, it’s… it just grows that way.  I, um—listen, I need to—g—”

“Does the carpet match the curtains?” Verso asks.

Ed’s voice dies in his mouth—dies, and rots, and crumbles to ashes all in a matter of a moment.

This guy is—

Right this fucking _second_ , this guy is—

Thinking about him—

 _Naked_ , stripping him fucking bare in imagination—

Tearing off every last defense he’s got and treating it like some kind of clever fucking _joke_ —

Ed’s blood turns to gasoline—floods everywhere just beneath his skin, choking fumes rising in a sick miasma in his lungs, and the gleam in Verso’s eyes strikes a fucking match—

And this isn’t the rushing, trembling almost-good heat of a phoenix shedding feathers and emerging from the night.

This is charcoal and withered veins—this is instant fucking incineration.

If the fire doesn’t kill him, the humiliation will.

How could he not have _known_ —?

And he is so fucking helpless—so fucking _violated_ while some guy he’s exchanged half a dozen words with sits there smugly envisioning him divested of every last defense, pried open and laid bare and so fucking vulnerable—transforms him with the mere fucking mention of that imaginative power; unravels him with nothing but the _words_ —

And Suzy has no choice to think it either, now that it’s right there in the fucking open, so he might as well _be_ naked sitting at this fucking table in the middle of the fucking cafeteria—it might as well be _true_ —

How fucked up is it that someone like Verso can change what he _is_ just by speaking a raunchy-ass fucking thought about him aloud?

Ed’s stomach bottoms the fuck out, rebounds off of the floor or something, and twists up again, folding in on itself, tighter and tighter until it’s crushing the rest of his organs, and he’s liable to suffocate where he fucking sits; there’s got to be something—

He used to have a smart answer to everything.  He used to generate snark and rancor on the fly, with enough volume to make up for a lack of wit—

“Oh, look at _you_ ,” Verso says delightedly.  The hand darts up again, and Ed’s just fast enough to recoil before the backs of the knuckles graze against his flaming cheek.  “What?  Don’t be shy.”

Ed’s not sure how to say _I’m not fucking shy; I can’t decide whether I want to die or to murder you_ to a superior officer without getting his ass court-martialed before he’s even had the chance to punctuate it with some violence.

The whole world is a fucking minefield when you have to play the chess game—it’s not just here at headquarters; it’s not just under the eyes of the brass and their million little spies.  It’s everywhere, because any ambitious reporter could snap a photo of you falling-down drunk.  Any passerby could cook up a story about how you socked them in the street if you jostle your shoulder against their arm too hard.  Anything can happen, and anyone can destroy you, and you just have to keep biting your tongue until the blood in your mouth drowns whatever self-endangering shit you planned to say.

Nobody warned him about that part.

Maybe Roy protected him for too long—because that’s part of what sending him out there was about, which is obvious in retrospect.  Part of it was to free him for his own quest; part of it was to keep him out from under anybody else’s thumb; part of it was that he was goddamn _good_ at solo missions, and he brought back results and then jaunted off again before he could interfere with any of Roy’s business.

But part of it was about casting him far enough away that he could offend anyone he wanted without catching any flack, and that meant he never had to learn how to tread so softly that he wouldn’t trip over a trigger.

Ed’s not sure he’s ever seen someone who looked more like a rigged explosive than Colonel Martin Verso.

If Roy had enough clout to get away with unleashing _him_ at that rank, what the fuck might this guy manage while people looked the other way?

Ed has to get the fuck out of here before he either hits this fucker or throws up on the front of that clean-pressed uniform.  He’s figured that much out—when a situation starts to get too delicate for his clumsy fucking skills, the best solution is to extricate himself before he breaks something Roy will have to fix.

That’s fine.  He’s fine.  It’ll be fine.

The deep, shuddering revulsion swelling in the core of him is just going to have to wait.

“I, um,” he says.  “I think I—better—”

Excuse.  What’s his excuse?  Where’s he running off to in the middle of fucking lunch—well, “lunch”, based on the contents of his plate—that’s so plausibly fucking urgent?

“Oh,” Suzy breathes, and he seizes on the sound and looks at her; maybe she’ll save him; maybe—

“Sorry to interrupt,” Roy’s voice says from _right_ fucking behind Ed’s shoulder, and he startles so hard he bangs his right knee on the underside of the table, and pins and needles burst outward from the point of impact.  “Afternoon, Colonel; Corporal—may I borrow Major Elric from you?”

If Ed believed in anything, there would be some prayers of gratitude.  Possibly tears.  Although that could be the fat fucking bruise starting to form on his kneecap talking.

The knee in question is not helping his regular old shitty balance as he tries to lever himself backwards off of the bench without brushing against Verso, who hasn’t drawn his fucking hand back an _inch_.

“I’m afraid I need your research expertise,” Roy is saying—or that’s what it sounds like, through the pounding in Ed’s head and the lurching carousel twirl of nausea in his guts—as Ed fights his way off of the bench and somehow stands up straight without wincing.  Roy waits just long enough for him to snatch up his tray and then starts striding towards the exit.  “There’s a particular file that Second Lieutenant Falman swears actually exists—which would be bad enough by itself, but Sheska assures me it’s real, too—but I can’t find it in the records rooms for the life of me, and I need it for the—”

“Let me guess—for the three o’clock,” Ed says, trying to muster a convincing glare.  Roy grimaces.  “You couldn’t’ve mentioned this earlier?”

“I was trying to find it myself,” Roy says.  Ed tosses his tray down onto the bussing station and glances sideways at Roy.  “Like I said, I didn’t believe in its existence until multiple better memories swore otherwise.”

“Right,” Ed mutters, and then they’re out into the hall, and turning a corner, and—

Roy’s whole voice changes—goes instantly from business-smooth to personal-soft.

“Are you all right?” the bastard asks.

“Yeah,” Ed says.  It’d probably be a better lie if it hadn’t stuck in his throat a little and then finally wormed its way out of him sounding kind of strangled.  He narrowly bests the urge to hunch his shoulders, too.  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Roy looks intently at the hallway ahead of them.  “You looked a bit uncomfortable.  Frankly, that close to Martin Verso, I would be, too.”  Ed sneaks a glance at him, which is a fucking _mistake_ , because right then Roy runs the tip of his tongue over his upper lip, and for some fucking reason, that makes Ed’s heart start throbbing in his throat.  “I really do need your help with that file, though.”

Fuck, Ed is sweating so fucking cold.  This is the first time they’ve been alone since… since the stupid pub with the stupid wine and the stupid garlic fries, probably.  And even then, the public eye was on them; now it’s _anybody’s_ fucking guess—

“So what is it?” he asks.  “The file.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Roy asks.

Goddamnit.  This is _Roy_.  Roy’s not—Roy won’t—

He’s fucking safe with this man.  He knows that.

He just feels—unbalanced.  After that fucking asshole Verso suddenly got so far into his space—so far into his _head_ —

“Yeah,” he says.  “Just—remembered why I hate eating in that hellhole.  Don’t think whatever they’re passing off as chicken agreed with me.”

“Having disagreed with you in the past,” Roy says, “I’d sympathize with the chicken—if I hadn’t tried the food.  Unfortunately for all involved parties, however, I have.”  Ed tries to smile for him.  Who knows what the fuck ends up on his face; Roy makes a vague sort of gesture in the direction of the records rooms they’re fast approaching.  “The file—Falman says it should be a fairly narrow folder.  It’s an index of questionable arrests from the last year of the Bradley regime.”

Ed blinks.  “They—let that shit get _written down_?”

“Part of why I doubted its existence,” Roy says.  “He says he remembers it being slipped in with a very dry compilation of climate data, which is probably how it survived.”

“He should’ve kept it,” Ed says.  “Fuck’s sake, I would’ve shoved it down my _pants_.”

“Me, too,” Roy says calmly.

“Or eaten it,” Ed says.

“I think that strategy would have been slightly less effective,” Roy says, “but I support the sentiment.”

Smiling at him comes a little easier this time.  “I’ll see if I can find it.  No fuckin’ promises, but…”

“The best that you can do before three,” Roy says, smiling back, “would be appreciated more than I can express.”

It is unspeakably weird how they never seem to fight anymore.  Some part of Ed’s still waiting, poised to pounce on the slightest sign of annoyance and worry it between his teeth until they’re howling at each other across the room, and the windowpanes rattle with the force of their stubbornness colliding—

But it’s a small part, now.

Mostly he’s… relieved.  It is a fucking relief not to walk into Roy’s office and immediately start gunning for the thrill of the adrenaline and the frigid edge of real fear.  It is a fucking relief to be cultivating conversation and intuiting a mutual respect.

“Sure,” he says.  “I’ll bring you whatever I dig up.”

“Please limit it to files,” Roy says.  “I’m not sure I want to know what else is in there to be excavated.”

Ed makes a point of frowning at him.

Roy grins.

He looks so fucking _young_ when he does that.

Then he waves, cavalierly, and starts back down the hall.  “I’ll be despairing very quietly in the office if you need me.”

“Have fun,” Ed says.

“Always,” Roy says.

Ed squares his shoulders, breathes deep, and forges on into the records room.

Apparently Linda’s on curator duty today; he greets her as he goes in—most of the weather and geographic shit is in Room 3, which is good, because that gives him a place to start.  If memory serves, it’s the third aisle leftward from the door, and about halfway down, and…

Maybe this file folder would be different, right?  At the very least, it ought to look newer than the surrounding ones; maybe he can trail his fingers down the spines and feel a difference even if the distinction isn’t visible in the crappy light.  Maybe it’ll stick out like a sore thumb.  Maybe…

Maybe that’s exactly what Roy would’ve tried at least three times if he was trying to find this thing.

A different tack might be in order.  Ed lets his gaze skim along the wall of boxes and and books and the stacks of manila folders crammed between them as he weighs his options.  Falman, who should’ve just taken the fucking file and hidden it under his fucking mattress at home the instant that he saw it, would probably remark that options, as a concept, cannot actually have mass, and ergo can’t have weight, and ergo multiple choices can’t have _different_ weights, and…

Wait a damn second; there’s a thought.

Roy said it was _dry climate records_ , right?  And Ed heard that as _boring as all fucking get-out_ , but—what if that was a direct quote?  Falman’s not much good with idioms.  What if he meant _literally_ dry?  What if he was talking about the contents of the surrounding records, not their quality?

Ed’s only got two hours to get this to Roy if the bastard wants any time to read it—anything is worth a try.

Dry records, dry, arid, drought—

The drought in 1903 almost wiped Resembool off the map—the East was so fucking barren that year they weren’t the only ones scraping to survive.  Mom was looking fucking frail by the end of the summer; he _remembers_ that—but his little baby brain attributed it to the shortage, the heat, the desolation, the hunger, the things that could subside.  Not to the start of something worse.

It wasn’t just their quadrant of the map, either—as far as he can tell from the limited time he’s had with the history books, everybody felt it, and everybody hurt.  What’s not in the textbooks is the fact that combination of the economic impact and the fear probably made it fucking easy for Bradley to bear down on Ishval all the harder, and their retaliations supposedly justified actions even worse—

The labels on this shit are barely legible when they exist at all, because apparently nobody cares about the weather here, but it only takes him a couple random pulls of folders before he hits on one from ’02, and they’re mostly chronological from there.  Summer, summer of 1903—May, May, June, a thick-ass stack of really badly-drawn graphs with _Spring_ scrawled across the top and no damn date at all, because apparently this place is not, in fact, a records room but a records _graveyard_ , where the ones that haven’t been doctored go to die.

One of the files is jammed full of clipped-out newspaper articles about the drought; the next one has patient rosters from Central Hospital—somehow it’s hard to believe this was only fifteen fucking years ago; it’s hard to believe this happened in his lifetime.  Everyone and their fucking uncle was getting heatstroke, passing out in the street, cracking their heads open—people were dying in fucking droves of _cholera_ here, using contaminated fucking water as a last resort and then being unable to stay hydrated enough to get through it—

There wasn’t enough water to clean wounds; there wasn’t enough antiseptic to make up for the lack of water—

He shoves that file back and takes a deep fucking breath.  It could be worse—right?  It could always be worse.  The summer they just had was a bitch and a half for him personally and for everyone dreaming of cooler climes, but at least the rivers didn’t run dry.  At least there weren’t corpses rotting in the sun because the ground was too fucking hard to bury them.

He yanks out the next one, and the next—maybe this was a stupid idea after all; did he really just try to bet something this important on a word with a double meaning?  This is why gambling is for fucking fools; he’s never had an iota of “luck” in his life; “luck” doesn’t _exist_ —it’s just a combination of chance and confirmation bias, and—

The next folder in the sequence is sort of stuck; he has to haul on it to pull it free, and then he flips it open, and—

Mugshots.

Not grainy photos inside a hospital where you can practically see the heatwaves; nothing striped with blurred ink like the newspaper print.  Police photographs.  Military police photographs.

He turns a few pages just to be sure, but his heart’s already leaping; this is fucking _it_ ; this is the one—

Goddamn, that feels… good.  It feels good to do something fucking right for once—on the first try, without having to kill himself over it; without having to struggle with every last detail and fight it through to the bitter end.

He draws out the climate files that were on either side of this one on the shelf and sandwiches it back in between them.  All of the rubber bands that used to be on these suckers have crumbled into drooping, disintegrating gum-dust, but he manages to extract one fully intact piece of string that someone used fuck knows how many years ago to tie some other folders together.  He wraps his prize up loosely and then holds it in the crook of his left arm, with his elbow out so he can defend it if he has to.  Hopefully he’s gotten good enough at this bullshitting bullshit that nobody will suspect a thing.

He steps back out of the claustrophobic little aisle, tugs the cord to kill the lights, and then heads out of the room, drawing the door shut behind him.  If Roy didn’t need this right fucking now, he’d ask Linda how she’s doing and all that shit, but for now he has to settle with wishing her a nice day and moving on.

He has to figure out something cuttingly clever to say to Roy when he hands it over.  Digging at the fact that he almost lost his fucking eyesight is a little too pointed—even if it’d be kind of hilarious.  Well, a little bit hilarious.  The problem with that is that you have to get the tone just right so that it’s sort of gently mocking instead of mean, and these days it’s fucking impossible to gauge how words are going to sound by the time they’ve traveled from the back of Ed’s stupid brain to the end of his stupid tongue.  He doesn’t trust himself to skim that one with the delicacy that it needs—you’d think the difference between skipping a stone across the surface of a lake and throwing a rock at someone is pretty fucking simple, but sometimes it just leaves your hand wrong, and no matter what you intended—

“Edward,” someone says.

He whirls on his heel—almost fast enough to fling the fucking papers out of the folders; he feels them starting to shift and instinctively clutches at them even as he trains his eyes on—

Verso.

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

Can’t this fucking day just _end_?

“May I call you that?” Verso asks.  Ed’s stopped still as his body tries to remember how to fucking move, but that doesn’t seem to deter the colonel, who continues towards him at a decidedly leisurely pace.

There was time to run.  There was plenty of time to bolt for the fucking records room, dive under Linda’s desk—but he feels frozen _solid_ ; he feels like a statue halfway turned to flesh; the only parts that have been made sensible are the trembling tips of his fingers and the thickening lining of his throat.

A superior officer asked him a fucking question.

Verso’s not _tall_ -tall—not like Armstrong, or Sig, or somebody—but he’s got a full six inches on Ed.

“Whatever you want, sir,” Ed says.  It’s marginally less fucking idiotic than any of the other options supplied by his dizzily scrambling brain.

Verso’s slow grin tells him instantly that he just made a terrible fucking mistake.

“I want a lot of things,” Verso says, and his slow, slow, ineluctable fucking swagger carries him closer, and Ed takes one step back—then two— “But I know how it works—and I know what the alchemists say.  Nothing comes for free, isn’t that right?”

“Um—” Another half step, and Ed can feel the fucking wall behind him; how did this—what’s even fucking going _on_ here?  His instincts flare; this is some fight or flight shit; his hackles are up, and the adrenaline is singing through his fucking veins— “Yeah, it’s sort of… like that, I guess. Equivalent exchange.”

“Right,” Verso says.  He stops advancing when there’s about a fucking foot remaining between his chest and Ed’s—less when Ed tries to drag in a deep breath and force his panicked brain to slow the fuck down— “But don’t worry.  I can assure you that _very_ good things happen to people who give me what I want.”

Ed’s heartbeat in his ears patters so fast it almost sounds like a single noise, like an ongoing hum, as the individual pulses run together.

A part of him—a minuscule fucking fragment that’s still smart; that isn’t mesmerized by the terrifying potential in Verso’s glittering eyes; that isn’t hypnotized by the serpent’s sightline, just _waiting_ for the venom strike—gathers the remnants of his voice.

“I need to go give this to General Mustang,” he says.

Verso’s arm moves in what seems like slow-motion, but Ed’s muscles ossified so long ago that he can’t even flinch.

Verso plants his hand on the wall just above Ed’s left shoulder, next to his head.

Ed can’t hit him.  Ed probably can’t even shove him; Ed has his left arm wrapped around the files, and if he pushed Verso with his right hand with any real force, it’d bruise him—probably, knowing Ed’s luck, in the specific fucking shape of his automail, so there’d be no damn doubt about it when Verso dragged him into court—

His heart bangs in his throat so fast that Verso can probably see the _flitflitflit_ rhythm of his blood rushing right through his carotid.

“This is important,” Verso says, and his voice lowers in register and volume at once.  “This is about your future, Edward.  You haven’t risen in rank since you started, have you?”

“No,” Ed forces out.  “But I don’t—”

“All that I’m asking for,” Verso says softly, “is what you’re already giving Mustang.  And I will give you so much more in return.”

Ed has to swallow before he can speak, and the way Verso’s gaze flicks down to his throat fucking scares him.

“All I’m givin’ Mustang,” he says, “is this file.  If you’ll ex—”

Verso braces his other arm against the wall to cage Ed between them the instant Ed tries to sidle sideways.

“He must have trained you very well,” Verso says, and the softness of his voice has tilted dangerous; “if you’re so adamant to get back on your knees for him.”

Ed’s guts clench.  “Wh—”

 _What_ is a stupid question.

He knows _what_.

Verso—and probably half of the other ignorant fuckers in this place—honestly believes that Ed convinced Roy to let him into the military by sucking his dick.

It makes him sick, sick, _sick_ —ill, unwell, unsteady; fucking weak with it; it bowls him the fuck over; the mere fucking implication carries so much _hurt_ —

His stomach lurches, and his head spins, and if he hadn’t pressed himself back against the wall so hard trying to escape, he might have to say hello to the fucking floor, the way the wave of vertigo takes him.

Verso wants him to kneel down right fucking here in this hallway and—do whatever exactly it is that oral sex entails; put his _mouth_ on—

Or at the very fucking least, that’s what he’s thinking about right this second, probably in painstaking fucking detail, and—

And Ed can’t—he _can’t_ —stay here and stand this; he can’t fucking bear it; he can’t—

 _Breathe_ —can’t gasp in any air to speak, to scream, to shout, to beg, to snarl his fucking protests—

He used to be so fucking sharp that no one would have dared to touch him for fear he’d cut them on contact.

He used to be so strong that he was safe.

“You’re still young,” Verso says, and Ed tries to jerk his head out of the way, but there’s nowhere to _go_ , and Verso’s fingers twine into his hair again— “I’m sure you could learn a few tricks from a new master, hmm?”

The heel of his hand brushes Ed’s jaw—warm; far too fucking warm—and then a few of his fingertips settle under Ed’s chin and push upward so that Ed has to lift his head and expose his throat—

“Stop,” he fights out.  “Stop—touching me—don’t—”

“Funny,” Verso says, and—the damp heat curling against Ed’s neck can’t be anything other than his breath—which means his mouth is so fucking close he could—he’s practically— “I don’t see his name on you.”

Ed’s heart beats everywhere, hard and fast and fucking frantic—in the knot in his throat, in the cavern of his chest, against the backs of his eyes.  He has to fucking _do_ something, but he can’t exactly bring his metal knee up into any tender portion of Verso’s anatomy if he wants to work in this city—in this _country_ —ever again.  He has to think; he has to think his way out of this; he has to surface from the drowning swell of animal fucking panic—has to think so swiftly that he forgets the thick shadow and the huge weight of the unknown human body bearing down on him—

Verso’s hand drags through his hair again, and then the fingertips trace down the side of his neck, nudge his collar aside, press intently against his clavicle—

Where the fuck _is_ everyone?  It’s fucking work hours; why does _no one_ need the fucking records?  Why—?

Everything is frozen solid; everything is brittle ice, rattled by his heartbeat; everything is suffocating snow; numb to the core, and nothing moves—fear courses through and hollows him and leaves him so fucking _cold_ —

Nobody is going to save him.

Nobody ever has.

“Leave me alone,” he says.  His voice sounds small and faint, but it fucking exists, and that’s something.  “Let _go_.  Don’t touch me; don’t—”

Verso hooks one finger into the uppermost catch on his uniform jacket and hauls him forward, and a dry brush against his throat turns to moist heat and a smear of wet—

That’s Verso’s _mouth_ —his spit, his— _tongue_ —

Fierce darts of pain where he sinks in his _teeth_ —

Ed doesn’t think—not even half a flicker of coherence; no comprehension at all.

He just—

Moves.

He draws his right arm up close to his own body and then extends it, sweeping outward from the elbow—grasping Verso’s opposite shoulder, forearm flat across his chest—and just maintains the momentum, pushing up and out and twisting himself away and underneath—

Verso starts to shift, and that fucking arm comes up again—hand out and fingers grasping.  The tips graze the fabric of Ed’s uniform—he feels the tug, but too light and too late; he slides loose, slips free, and—

 _Runs_ —

Down the hall, half-blind, hiking the folders up and hugging them to his chest—he turns the first corner and pelts down the next corridor; he doesn’t care; he doesn’t fucking care where he ends up, as long as—

As long as it’s not fucking _here_ —

Even with his heart pounding and his stomach churning and the heat of a mortified flush stabbing at the inside of his throat and his face and his ears—he more or less recognizes the layout of this place; the environs of the records rooms have become familiar enough that even in this haze of burning skin and choking panic, he knows to hang a sharp left at the next intersection of hallways.  That one takes him almost directly to a set of stairs; he careens down and flings himself around the bend so fast that the woman coming up squeaks audibly, and his passage ruffles all her papers, but there’s no fucking time to apologize—

He just keeps going.

He just keeps going at full fucking speed—next right; right again after that—until he skids to a stop, panting fit to burst his fucking lungs, in front of the door to the bathrooms.  He shoulders through it, and then he spins around, presses the folders to his chest with his left arm to free his palm, claps, and smacks his right hand against the locking mechanism on the door to seal it shut.

His knees are shaking.  Everything is shaking.  The whole fucking world keeps wobbling as he tries to walk across the tiles—somehow he makes it all the way to the bank of sinks; there’s a sort of shelf part sticking out of the wall under the mirror to contain the plumbing.  He sets the folders own on it.  Somehow the string is still looped around them.

He sets his right hand on the edge of the closest sink for a second, and the glove muffles the clink of the automail against the porcelain.

He’s been through worse than this.

He’s been through so much worse than this, but he can still feel the encroaching burn of Verso’s mouth against his throat, the brush of the beard, the tug of those fingers tangling in his hair—he still feels _trapped_ like a cornered fucking animal, teeth bared and fur bristling to mask the fact that he doesn’t have any real defenses—

He still feels fucking powerless.

The possessive force of Verso’s foreign fucking hands on him might as well have bruised him everywhere they landed; he feels marked; he feels claimed; he feels _filthy_.

What did he fucking do?  What did he fucking do _wrong_?

It’s a thing alive inside him now—the suggestion; the requests; the demands.  His brain replays it, in little damaged-record fits, stuttering static and repeated little jerks—

He should’ve—fought, or said something so fucking cutting Verso would’ve just backed away—should’ve said he had some highly communicable disease, or that he was bringing that file to the Führer, or—

 _Something_ —

No one’s ever done shit like that to him before; what did he _do_ to put the idea in—

He doesn’t have to glance in the mirror to know the answer to that.

He fumbles to get his fingers in the tie in his hair and drags it out, yanking sharply every time it sticks.  Fuck it.  Fuck all of it; fuck all of this; fuck _him_ , thinking he could just— _be_ , just do things, just go about his fucking business and expect people to leave him alone; expect people not to care, or mind, or take advantage of how twisted-up he is underneath—

He can’t do much of anything fancy with these numb-ass fingers, but he doesn’t need anything special anyway; he just needs his damn hair out of his damn face.  He ties it back at the base of his neck in a limp tail.  Good e-fucking-nough.

_Get on your knees, get on your knees, get on your—_

Like a fever.  And his heart beats to it; the rhythm of his blood ferries the fucking accusation to every last extremity, and—

He just—

Can’t.

He can’t carry that; he can’t—

He has to get it out.

He has to get it _out_ of him.

He raises his hand and nips the index fingertip of the glove to tug it off, then shoves it into one of the pockets on the inside of his jacket; after a second of vaguely dizzy deliberation, he unhooks the cavalry skirt and drapes it over the basin of the sink—all the way across, so that it won’t slip down.  The whole point is to keep it off the floor.

When he’s pretty sure neither it nor the files are likely to make a break for the bacteria-encrusted tiles of the linoleum, he crosses to the row of stalls and applies his elbow to the closest door to swing it open, and then he gets down on his fucking _knees_ —

And lifts up the toilet seat with his left hand and opens his mouth for the fingers of the right.

He reaches until they hit the back of his throat, and then he pushes until he gags—the whole-body convulsion of it still rubs his instincts the wrong way; still telegraphs as _bad_ even when it’s the only thing in the world he fucking wants right this second.

He presses harder, and the revolt ( _revolting; he is sick; he is wrong; he is_ revolting _; he is—_ ) starts as a deep-down jolt in his guts that shudders up his spine swifter than a thought.  His stomach rolls, and then contracts, and then presses upward—and then the balance changes, and the rest happens so fucking suddenly—

The deliberateness of this whole fucking situation doesn’t quell the moment of miserable shock and instinctual fucking terror when the bile fills his throat, and for that long, long second, his whole airway’s full of liquid, and he can’t fucking _breathe_ —

He vomits into the toilet bowl, gasps twice, spits, and sits back on his heels, letting his tortured fucking body lean sideways until he’s propped himself against the wall of the stall.

Then he scrambles forward and throws up again.

He waits a little while this time, counting down the better part of a minute, trying not to let the smell of his own fucking sick coax any more out of him.

He feels—

Better?

Maybe.

Emptier.

So that’s a start.

He gets up and flushes the toilet and trails his hand along the wall of the stall to steady himself on his feet before he crosses back to the sinks.  He rinses his mouth out a couple of times and then washes his hands and then splashes some of the cold water on his face.  He intended to glance at himself in the mirror to see if he’s pale as a fucking sheet, but he can’t—look.  Not right now.

He slings the cavalry skirt back around his waist and hooks it on, and then he pulls his glove on again, and then he picks up his files and goes to the door and hits the lock with a smooth bit of alchemy to undo what he did before.

He doesn’t—he _doesn’t_ —lift his hand up and rub at the spot on his neck that’s feels like a bed of pinpricks where Verso—

He just doesn’t.

  


* * *

  


He looks over his fucking shoulder every step of the trip down to the office, but no one materializes behind him.  He runs into a couple of people on the way, but nobody pays any attention to him past a cursory glance—and _fuck_ , when did that become a blessing—?

He opens the door as quietly as he can and tries to get a quick impression of who’s present and who’s not.

Nah.  Fuck that equivocation.  He looks to see if _Roy’s_ in the outer office to see him.

Apparently one thing’s gone right today.

Hawkeye stiffens just a tiny bit as he steps through the doorway; he must look like shit.  The crap excuse for a hairstyle he rigged himself up with probably isn’t doing him any favors, but he doesn’t exactly have spare fucks lying around to give for that.

He crosses over to her and extracts the middle folder from his stack and offers it.  “Can you give this to him?” he asks, and his voice mostly stays level.  “For the meeting at three.”

“Of course,” she says, and her eyes say the rest of it, but he can’t… cope… with sympathy.  Not right now.

“Thanks,” he says, keeping every intonation as neutral as he can, and then he circles around the table to drop down into his seat.

He looks at the clock.

Three more hours.

He’ll make it.

Somehow he will.

He hunkers down over a huge stack of reports and tries to focus on them—tries to pin his eyes on the words one letter at a time when they start to blur and squiggle; he’s just so fucking tired, and the acrid taste of his own stomach acid keeps clawing at the back of his tongue, and every fucking place where Verso _touched_ him seethes like a festering wound, and it’s only a matter of time before an open sore breeds maggots, right?

Hawkeye steps into Roy’s office, and he tenses—not enough for the guys to notice, probably, but he makes himself relax again just in case.  Her voice is too muted for him to hear, but he’d be willing to bet that she respects him too much to fling his business in Roy’s face without his permission, and she’d never do it during work hours.  Roy says something that sounds like, “Oh, excellent,” and then something that might be “I’m glad there wasn’t money on the line this time,” and Hawkeye says “As am I, sir,” and with any goddamn fucking luck, Roy will be too amused with his own wit to wonder why Ed didn’t bring it in himself, and that’ll be the end of it.

Ten minutes before three, some shuffling from the inner sanctum heralds Roy shouldering his coat on and then striding out to the meeting.  Ed keeps his head down; keeps his breath slow; keeps his hand moving even though it wants to stop and just—shake.  He has no idea whether Roy even glances at him on the way out; the man’s in far too much control of his own body to betray it with a pause in his walking pace or anything as obvious as that.  It’s better not to know.  If he looked, he’ll have noticed that Ed changed his hair.

Ed feels guilty for being glad about this stupid meeting in more ways than one—Roy’ll be fucking miserable; it’s going to be _crap_ ; it’s one of those ones that’s like a chess game, except that you’re playing against eight people who hate you and one who thinks you’re sort of interesting, and almost all of them have the power to decapitate you if you lose.

But on the other hand, it’s got two benefits for Ed—first off, Roy’ll be way too distracted trying to solve the murder-puzzle to pay much attention to the fact that Ed was acting unusually just now; second, it’ll probably take at least two hours for Roy to wade through the murder-quicksand of the meeting itself, so no one’ll think twice if Ed cuts the fuck out at five instead of waiting around for him to talk murder-shop.

So that’s just a couple hours he has to trudge through—without garnering suspicion from any of the guys, and without giving the whole thing away to Hawkeye just by meeting her gaze.

He’s been through so much worse.

No fuckin’ problem.

  


* * *

  


He knows—from a rational standpoint—that Hawkeye’s too good to him to press an issue like this unless she has some definitive proof that it’s right about to push him off the deep end.  There’s still a moment where he thinks she will—a moment where his heartbeat trills a wild alarm as he gets up from his desk and shuffles all his papers together in a way that’ll suck a little less on Monday, and he can almost hear the question teetering on the tip of her tongue—but the prediction holds.  He says his goodbyes and swans out before anybody else has even finished gathering up their shit—

And realizes his critical fucking error when he steps out into a hallway full of jostling bodies as everybody makes a break for the door.

At least nobody he knows is here to see him being grateful for his stupid fucking size for once.  Sure, bigger elbows would probably be an asset for muscling his way through this shit, but right now the last thing he wants to do is make any contact with another human being.  Slipping in between people is the way to fucking go, and as far as that’s concerned—

Well, Al would have it a little bit harder, is all.

Al would also have it harder because he doesn’t know any of the shortcuts and back halls and less-used passageways that Ed’s found on his own or walked with Roy or Hawkeye over the years, since the Dynamic Duo has long since designed their own routes to almost anywhere in the building, which are either naturally faster or faster if you take them at a run while no one’s watching. Roy calls it _the seminal element of surprise_. Hawkeye calls it _fairly simple cartography, sir, but if that’s kinder on your dignity…_

The point is, he gets the fuck out without having to brush shoulders with too many strangers, so he’s less on-edge than he could be.  It’s only two miles home—less than twenty minutes.  He’s almost there.  He’s almost there, and then he can shut the door and lock it and leave this fucking day _behind_.

  


* * *

  


“What’s wrong?” Al asks the instant he steps through the door—before he’s even come in far enough to show his face, while his back is turned to hang his jacket on the coatrack.

“Nothing,” Ed says.

That was stupid.  He should’ve made up something innocuous that he could theoretically be annoyed about to throw Al off the scent of the real thing; that kid is way too smart to fall for an actual lie.  Ed’s judgment is all fucked from the lousy sleeping and the… everything.  From everything.

“Uh huh,” Al says, sounding about as unconvinced as it is humanly possible to sound.  “What do you want for dinner?”

Ed’s stomach tightens at the mere fucking thought—and then keeps tightening, and twisting, and squirming until it’s just one big fucking miserable knot—

“I’m not—hungry,” he says.  Shitfuck; how slow does he learn?  “I ate at the office.  There was—Breda was starving at, like, four, and he went and got sandwiches.”

“Okay,” Al says, although the convinced-ness levels in his voice haven’t substantially risen.

“Hey,” Ed says, crossing into the kitchen without looking at Al where he’s sprawled across the couch.  “Do we have scissors in here somewhere?”

“I think so,” Al says.  “Try the drawer next to the knives.  What for?”

Ed’s been thinking.

He’s been thinking a fucking lot, in between filling the lines of the reports and counting the streetlamps and piquing his ears for any footsteps that might be trailing too close.

And the knot in his guts just won’t come loose.

“I’m going to cut my hair,” he says.

He opens the drawer next to the knives.

Someone—probably Pinako—gave them a garlic press.  There’s also a spatula, two vegetable peelers, and a pair of scissors with a set of long, clean blades.

He could cut out the place Verso kissed him—just wedge the edges in and slice it off; if removing the skin didn’t fix it, he could stab the end in and just start digging—

 _Fuck_.

His shoulders go tight as light footsteps scuff along the kitchen floor behind him—for a second he can’t make his brain understand that it’s just _Al_.

“Why do you want to do that, Brother?” Al asks quietly.

He swallows.  He sets his right hand on the counter and picks up the scissors in his left, curling his fingers around the hinge.  He could just—bury it in the meat of himself somewhere, anywhere; if he _felt_ it cold and fucking solid, carving its way deep—while the blood ran hot around it, he’d _know_ he’s real; he’d _know_ he’s alive—

He stares at the countertop, and a tiny plaintive part of him wants to know when the hell it came to this.

He never used to think shit like this.

He never used to _be_ so…

Sad.  Stupid.  Self-destructive.

Weak.

“People kept looking at me different,” he says.  “When I had it down.  I don’t fucking like it.”

Al is just two steps away now, but he pauses there.  “Doesn’t that say more about them than it does about you?”

“Not when they’re the ones who make the rules,” Ed says.  “And they’re the ones who tell the story how they want it heard, and then they pass their fucking judgment afterwards.”

“What happened?” Al says softly.

“Nothing,” Ed bites out.

He’s gripping the scissors so tightly he can feel his pulse beating against the metal—too fast; too fast; counting his pathetic fucking life down one split-second at a time, and for _what_?

Al breathes in and out slowly—maybe too slowly, maybe measuredly, like he’s trying really hard to keep his cool.  Like he’s just so sick and fucking tired of all of Ed’s bullshit and the lousy fucking lies—

“Brother,” Al says gently, “I love you.”

Ed stares at the dully-gleaming steel of his fist on the countertop.  There are new little nicks on it every time he looks—new smudges; new scratches; it’s never twice the same.  It’s impossible to memorize.

“Why?” he says.  “I’m a fucking _wreck_ , Al.  It’s like—it’s like I did everything I was ever built to, and now it’s over, and I’m fucking useless.  I served my fucking purpose, and now I’m just this—specialized machine with nothing left to _do_ , nothing left that I _exist_ for; it’s all just—it’s all just _shit_ , Al; it’s all just one stupid, shitty thing after another, and everybody just wants parts of me I don’t have even if I did know how to fucking give them, and I don’t—” He shuts his eyes, grits his teeth, leans forward and puts his weight on the steel arm, with the scissors clutched like a fucking lifeline in his left hand— “I used to be so much… better, Al.  I used to be so much _more_.  And I don’t know—I don’t know how—I don’t even know if it’s _possible_ , if—”

Two more footfalls, and then a body conforming to his back—and that’s all right; it’s all right because it’s Al, because the face pressing its cheek against the back of his head is all he ever fought for.

“You’re enough,” Al whispers.

“I’m not,” Ed says.  “I’m fucking not; I never—”

“You are,” Al says.  “You’re enough.  You’re good enough.  You are.”

He will not fucking cry—not for this, not over a shitty day of ordinary stupidity.  Not over the enormity of who Alphonse Elric is; not over the indescribable beauty of what this kid is capable of.  “It’s not—”

“Hush,” Al says, and the arms wrapping around him tightly are warm and real and safe.  Even the steel plates and the sharp spikes felt like home; even convex curves felt like cushions when Ed laid his head down on them, because he _knew_ —

He knew Al would never fucking give up on him, no matter how bad it gets.

“Put that down,” Al says, grasping his left wrist and shaking gently until he drops the scissors back into the drawer.  “Listen to me.”

“Hard to fucking avoid it when you’re shouting in my ear,” Ed mutters, ignoring pertinent details such as the fact that Al isn’t shouting, and that he wouldn’t move from here if there was a fortune on the line.

Al headbutts his temple so lightly that the gesture probably wouldn’t be recognizable if they weren’t such dorks.  “I said _listen_.  Things are different.  Okay?  Things have changed; we’ve changed; the way we interact with the whole world has.  And maybe it hasn’t changed for the ‘better’; maybe things are harder now than they were, in some ways.  Or maybe it was always like this, and it’s just that you and I never had time to stop and see it, and now all of this lousy stuff that we didn’t even notice before is catching up.”

He starts hauling, and Ed lets himself be dragged backwards and sat down at the kitchen table.  Al drops into the chair next to him and keeps one arm half-draped around his shoulders.

“None of that matters,” Al says.  “Because we’re going to get through it.  Okay?  You and me.  We’re going to find a way to make it good.  And nobody—nobody in the military, nobody in the _world_ —can make us quit.”

Ed looks at him.

It sure sounds nice.

“Don’t do that hangdog face thing,” Al says.  “I’m making you some tea.”

“How come that sounds like a threat?” Ed asks.

“It is,” Al says.  “If you don’t drink it and feel a little better, I’m going to kick your sorry butt.  Okay?”

Ed feels himself starting to smile, which is kind of a relief.  “Okay,” he says.

  


* * *

  


The upshot of all of it is that the tea’s decaffeinated and/or drugged, and by the time nine o’clock rolls around, he’s so fucking tired it feels like Olivier Armstrong ran him over with her tank and then put it in reverse and flattened him again.

He used to pull all-nighters all the time—or at least a seriously inadvisable percentage of it.  He used to subsist on coffee and explosive rage; he used to barrel through obstacles by force of will alone.  He used to… care.  He used to care about everything.  He used to have _energy_ left to care after he was finished fighting his way through the fucking day.

But Al’s right.  Al’s always right; it’s part of being Al.  Things are different.  Dwelling on it isn’t going to change jackshit.

“Hey, Brother,” Al says as he pads back out of the bathroom after blearily shoving his toothbrush around in his mouth a couple times.

“Yeah?” he manages.

“I mean it,” Al says.  “I love you.  Lots of people do.  But I loved you first, and I love you most, and nothing is going to change that, ever.”  He glowers, and he looks so fucking much like Mom, and Ed’s heart just about tears itself in half.  “Okay?”

“Okay, okay,” Ed says.  “Jeez.  I got it.  And I fucking love you too.”

The glare dissolves instantly into a beaming grin.  “Good.”

Ed rolls his eyes, drags his weary meatbag back down the hall, and deposits it on the mattress.

He made it.

He made it through today; he’s still here.

That’s something.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the epic delay; I was stupid enough to sign up for a panel for YaoiCon, the prep for which ate the weekend before the con. And then, quite in spite of the fact that I then had to _do the panel_ , the con itself ate the following weekend because it was so great. ^^;
> 
> Tl;dr this is only the BEGINNING of the Fluffball Date of Doom. Enjoy. :'D ♥

Weekends are the fucking best.  By the time Ed cracks an eye open, the light in the room is warm and angled from up high—he probably slept for fucking _ever_ , and he feels so much less shitty it’s like hugging a warm balloon.

He rolls over onto his back—tweaking his automail shoulder a little in the process, which impinges on the bubble of contentment a bit—and then gazes up at the ceiling trying to decide whether or not he should go back to sleep.  He doesn’t have a goddamn thing he has to do today, does he?  He can just lie here for six fucking hours if he wants; he can reach around on the floor and probably find a book or two and just glaze the fuck over for as long as he feels like it, and—

The phone rings: once, twice…

“Elric residence,” Al’s voice says.  There’s a pause.  “Oh, General.  Hello.”  There’s another pause.  “I’m usually very good at compartmentalizing, but in this particular case, you’re still his boss, so—”

Fucking figures.

Ed rolls off of the bed—which makes his damn shoulder twinge harder; he really needs to talk to Winry about that—and levers himself upright. He looks down to confirm that he has pants on, because you never fucking know sometimes, and then goes out into the hall, where Al’s lounging against the end table and twirling the phone cord around his finger. That must be a habit he picked up chatting with Win, and then it just sort of stuck with the muscle memory of the phone or something.

“Anyway,” Al says.  He smiles at Ed and… does not give up the receiver.  “Oh—yes, that’s exactly what I told him.  He said it’s not a matter of obligation; if he felt obligated, he’d tell you what orifice to insert it in.”

Ed introduces the heel of his left hand to his face, not especially gently.

Al’s grinning.  “He’s here now.  He wants the phone, but I’m not going to give it to him.  Based on what he told me, I think he considers it… I mean, it’s his end of the bargain.  You held up yours.  Even if he has reservations, he’s sure he wants to give it a try.”

“If he doesn’t want to go,” Ed says, “he can just fucking say so instead of trying to talk me out of it.”

“Did you hear that?” Al asks.  He blinks as he waits.  “Well—yes, but I don’t think it was you.  Or this.  Or at least not specifically.” He scowls. “ _Should_ I think it was you?  Did you do someth—gosh, okay, _okay_. I was joking.  Mostly.  Well, test-joking.  You passed.”

For a second, Ed swears his hearing’s gone incredibly good—he’s so fucking sure of the exact tone in which Roy must be saying _“Thank… you?”_ that he might as well be listening to the words.

“You’re welcome,” Al says calmly.  “Should he meet you at the restaurant, or are you going to pick him up?”  He turns to Ed.  “You are going to a restaurant, right?”  He speaks into the phone again.  “If you take him to the theater, don’t go to the Swan; they don’t like it when you analyze the physics of their stage effects—even though we weren’t _that_ loud.”

“I don’t want to go to the theater,” Ed says.  “Tell him I don’t—”

“The Cretan place just off of Main,” Al says; “reservation at seven thirty, and you’ll pick him up.  Lovely.”

“Stop arranging my date,” Ed says.

“I’m almost done,” Al says.  “No theater.  Did you get that?”  He grins.  “Good.  Oh, and—General?”  The grin goes _evil_.  “Don’t get handsy.  Or you won’t have hands for much longer.”

And Ed’s stomach plummets at the same instant that his heart jumps—the latter goes right up into the back of his mouth, blocking his breath, and his brain’s woken up enough now to call up crystallized fucking memories with gleaming jagged edges—

_You’re so adamant to get back on your knees for him—_

And it was his own fucking fault, wasn’t it?  The hair thing, partly—that was stupid; that was so fucking _dumb_ —but more than that, more directly, it’s his own fucking fault for shielding himself all this time.  For withdrawing, for withholding, for running from even the abstractions, for hiding from the very prospect of the pain—because it wouldn’t have been so fucking _bad_ if he’d been more prepared for it.  He wouldn’t have frozen stiller than a slab of fucking stone if he’d let himself get acclimated to the little splashes of the terror instead of waiting for the flood to overwhelm him—

It’s his own fucking _fault_.

And there’s a smeared line on his throat throbbing, and his mind keeps fixing on scissor blades, and Al’s looking at him in genuine alarm, and—

“I’m kidding,” Al says, reaching towards him, and he steels himself and _doesn’t_ pull away— “Brother—”

Al doesn’t hang up the phone; he just lets go of it—the jerk of the cord as the receiver swings heedlessly like a hanged man almost topples the whole thing off of the table, but Al doesn’t even glance backwards.  He reaches out, and it’s _Al_ , and his eyes are so fucking gentle, but Ed still—

Flinches.

And in the first split-second, with his hand outstretched, Al blinks, and there’s a well of hurt there so fucking deep that Ed can’t even fathom how far it goes.

But he knows why it’s there.  That might be the worst part.  He knows it’s because he won’t let Al in—not into this, not into any of the dark spaces that keep yawning wider every fucking day.

And it’s not a trust thing; it’s not because he thinks Al would take advantage or make it worse—

It’s because this is what he worked all those fucking years to avoid.

All he wants is for Al to be fucking happy—happy and normal; flesh and blood and sunshine smiles.

Like fucking hell is he going to be the _reason_ Al’s not.

“I’m fine,” he says quickly.  “I just—”

“You’re _pale_ ,” Al says.  His arm hovers in between them for another second before he lowers it, and—having plentiful experience with both—Ed would prefer getting socked in the fucking gut to feeling like this.

“I’m just hungry,” Ed says.  “Just like Mustang to call first thing in the morning and fuck up my breakfast plans.”

A very distant voice calls faintly from the telephone, and it may very well be saying _“I resent that.”_

“To be fair,” Al says slowly, “it’s half past ten.”

Shit, Ed really did sleep for an eon after all.  At least he knows he didn’t lose a day, or Roy wouldn’t be calling about the… date.

The date.

That he is going to go on.

With Roy.

Alone.

With Roy and Roy’s searing-hot eyes and Roy’s powerful, delicate, scar-riddled hands.

And Roy’s mouth—and his own damn filthy, tainted throat.

Is Roy going to fucking scent Verso’s mark on him and just— _not_?  Just not even want to anymore?  Can you tell that sort of thing when you know this shit backwards and forwards, from the inside out?

What if Roy wants—

What if—

“Brother,” Al says, and his voice trembles just a bit, “you are scaring the heck out of me right now.”

“Sorry,” Ed says.  Funny how easy that word comes out—knee-jerk, automatic, rapid-fire. He used to hate apologizing; now it feels like a reflex. “I’m probably dehydrated.  Damn, I slept _forever_.  Don’t try that, Al.”

Al gives him a look and then goes and picks up the phone.  “Isn’t seven thirty a little late?” he asks.  “At this rate, he might have wasted away by then.”  A pause, and Al gazes at the wall.  “Then it must also be sophisticated to starve.”  He smiles slightly.  “If Ed takes a bite out of your arm in the car, I reserve the right to say ‘I told you so.’”  He prods at the cord with a fingertip.  “Glad we’re in agreement.  See you then.”  The smile twists a little bit.  “I will.  Take care.”

He hangs up the phone and looks over at Ed, who has to resist the powerful urge to quail and duck away.

“Breakfast,” Al says—impressively menacingly, all things considered.

“There you go with the food threats again,” Ed says.

“The food threats will continue,” Al says, stomping overstatedly in the direction of the kitchen, “until you feel better.  Understood?”

“Jeez,” Ed says.  He drags himself upright and staggers after his slave-driver/savior.  “What’ve we got?”

“Just about everything,” Al says.  “I went shopping after class yesterday.  But you can’t eat it all at once, or you won’t have room for dinner.”

A part of Ed wants bacon, but a larger part can’t stand the thought of waiting; he opens the cabinet and assesses the cereal.  Fuck yes; Al got him the good one with the _‘questionable and possibly slightly poisonous’_ coloredmarshmallows in it.  “At this rate,” he says, batting the box down from the shelf, “ _you_ should go out with him.”

“If I was into men,” Al says calmly, “I would.  Although it’d be awkward that he’s your boss.”  He pretends to mull it over—which at least is better than commenting on the fact that Ed has to stretch to reach one of their bigger bowls.  “I’m glad you don’t think it’s awkward that he’s your boss.”

“It’s not like it’s ever been normal,” Ed says.

Al’s mouth curls up at the corners.  “That is an extremely good point.”

Ed goes to get the demon-juice.  Tragically that shit’s sort of non-negotiable in the cereal process—part of the reason he likes this kind of cereal is because the milk ends up tasting more like colored marshmallows than like itself.  “You think the Cretan place has garlic fries?”

“You’re the only person I know who can anticipate one meal while in the middle of another,” Al says.  “I don’t think they do.”

“S’probably a good thing,” Ed says.  “If I got more of those, I might end up religious.”

He sits down at the table with his huge fucking bowl.  Al sits down across from him and manages not to give the marshmallows a distasteful look.

“Brother,” Al says—and shit, that tone is _way_ worse than marshmallow judgment.  “Can we talk about it?”

Ed is a lot of things.  He’s a lot of things he didn’t used to be; and he’s no longer a lot of things he was.

But he’s still not chickenshit.

So there’s that.

“If you want to,” he says, and he jams a spoonful of cereal into his mouth and braces himself as much as he can.

Al takes a deep breath and sighs.  “I don’t want to force you, and I don’t want to guilt-trip you, but I really…”

“Am sick and tired of my bullshit,” Ed says.

“ _No_ ,” Al says, and the nose-wrinkle looks involuntary, so he must… mean it.  Right?  He leans forward and tries to meet Ed’s eyes.  “Can I tell you something?”

Ed tries to swallow to dispel the swollen feeling on his tongue.  “As long as it’s not something I didn’t want to know about Win.”

“Sort of,” Al says, but before Ed can freak out, he keeps going.  “The first time I went out with her, I was so nervous I thought I was going to pass out.”

Ed’s stomach clenches.  Maybe the marshmallows were a bad idea, but he didn’t know he was about to get the third fucking degree for the umpteenth time.

“It’s not nerves,” he says.  He waves a hand towards his chest and then his head, not that that probably fucking helps to illuminate the situation at all.  “It’s—pathological.  It’s _deep_ ; it’s like…”

Al pats the tabletop, which is adorable—he’s just too well-fucking-mannered to talk over Ed like he wants to, and it’s coming out in physical urgency instead.

“I know,” he says.  “I mean—no, I don’t, or not really; but—that wasn’t my point.  My point was that I was just so overwhelmed, but then… it was fine.  It was great.  It was really fun, and really nice, and there wasn’t anything to be nervous about.  And I know you trust Roy—I trust him, too, or I would’ve had a lot more words with him on the phone just for starters.  He’s not going to try to make you do anything you don’t want.  That man has twice as much emotional intelligence as just about anyone else that I’ve ever met.  He’ll _understand_ if there’s stuff you’re not comfortable with.  And that’s great, Ed.  That’s great, and I want that for you—but only if you want it, too.”

Looking at Al is sort of too hard right now, so Ed stirs his cereal around with the spoon and mashes one of the marshmallows against the side of the bowl.

“You know,” Al says in a different tone—a quieter, more thoughtful one—after a few seconds of silence broken only by the clink of Ed’s spoon against the ceramic.  “Not a whole lot usually happens on the first date.”

Ed risks glancing up at him to see if he’s just fucking around or what.  Why would he even…?

“I mean it,” Al says.  “I think Winry and I… barely even touched hands.  There was some blushing.  We linked arms on the way out after dinner, and we kissed right at the end, but it wasn’t even… it was pretty innocent, really.”

Ed eyes him.  This is edging perilously close to the guarded borders of shit-he-doesn’t-ever-want-to-think-regarding-either-Winry-or-his-baby-brother land.  “That’s… nice.”

Al eyes him right back.  “I’m trying to tell you that I really doubt he’s going to ask for anything you don’t know how to give.  So you don’t have to worry about it, okay?”

Ed probably shouldn’t hurl any processed sugar into his body right now; all of his organs are already rocketing around each other like drunk-ass fucking fireflies as it is.  “Wh—first off, I don’t— _worry_ ; I’m not _worried_ ; I just—it’s—reasonable caution, and—”

Al’s face is a terrible combination of smug and sad.  “Right.  ‘Reasonable caution’.”

Ed frowns at him.  “It _is_.  And—anyway—”  Fuck.  This is the hard part.  Every part’s the hard part, but he owes it to Al to be honest.  So often that’s just fucking beyondhim, but right now he’s still too groggy from the weird sleep and too emptied-out from the clusterfuck that was yesterday to be clever enough to lie.  “And anyway—it’s not—it’s just that he… will.  Eventually.  Want stuff I can’t… or I wouldn’t… have.  Or know.  Or whatever.”  He jabs at a marshmallow that is really just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  “So—it’s kind of—pointless.  Actually.  But I promised him, so—yeah.”

“Promise _me_ something,” Al says.  “Promise me you’ll trust your instincts.  You like spending time with him—and don’t say you don’t; you’ve gone and had dinner with him before.  This doesn’t have to be anything other than that.  That’s my point, Ed.  Just be you.  That’s all he’s really asking for.  He’s smart, Brother, and he cares about you—so many people do, even if you can’t see it and refuse to believe it.  He’s not going to try to hurt you.”

Ed obliterates a very unlucky marshmallow.  It’s purple.  Or it was, once; now it’s sort of a smear.  “He doesn’t have to try.  That’s the—it’s the whole fucking world, Al.  It’s institutional; it’s everywhere.  It’s just—isn’t it a hell of a lot fucking easier for one person to adapt than it is to change the entire fucking system of society?”

“Yes,” Al says.  “But screw ‘easier’.  You’ve spent most of your life sacrificing what you felt and what you wanted in favor of doing the right thing. Aren’t you tired of it by now?”

Ed stuffs his mouth with cereal and then forces himself to swallow.  It sort of sticks all the way down.

“I’m just tired,” he says.  “The reasons blend together after a while.”

He can feel Al watching him, so he feigns immense interest in chasing a pink marshmallow around his bowl.

“I’m going to make you some of the good coffee,” Al says.  He pushes his chair back and stands.

“It’s not that kind of tired,” Ed says.

“I know,” Al says, crossing to the counter.  “But it can’t hurt.”

Damn kid’s got him there.

  


* * *

  


He tries really hard to spend the whole afternoon determinedly not thinking about it, which is—unsurprisingly—about the worst possible way to go about avoiding the thoughts.  Eventually getting engrossed in the translated book about qi that Ling sent him ages ago helps—he’s been procrastinating on reading it because Ling’s so fucking hard to get ahold of, and he doesn’t want to burn through the damn thing and then not have it anymore.  It’s shit logic, and he knows it, but he’s been ignoring that part.

“Brother,” Al says, and he reluctantly drags himself to the surface world again—this qi thing goes back _forever_ , and so much of it’s documented only in myth and super fucking vague philosophy, but there’s hints everywhere, and parts of it sound like Hohenheim fucking spat them out himself— “You should take a shower.”

“Ouch,” Ed says.  “Jeez, Al.  After everything I’ve done for you—my own brother, telling me I stink.”

“That is not even remotely what I said,” Al says.  “So you’re a liar as well as stinky.  It’s just that you were running late yesterday, and you’re going to be wearing the nice clothes, and…”

Aw, fuck.  “Do I _have_ to wear the nice clothes?”

“If he’s taking you to the restaurant I think he is,” Al says, “yes.”

“We should call him and check,” Ed says.

“No, we shouldn’t,” Al says.

“That red tie you made me wear tried to kill me at the theater,” Ed says.

“The tie is an inanimate object,” Al says.  “It can’t have designs on your life.”

“Shows what you know,” Ed says.

“You probably put it on wrong,” Al says.

“You put it on _for_ me,” Ed says.  “Are _you_ trying to kill me?  Fuck’s sake, Al; at least have the decency to let me write a will so I can give everything to Winry instead of y—”

“That isn’t funny at all,” Al says, but he’s only scowling to fight down a smile.  “But if you’re going to be such a pill about it, you can skip the tie.”

“I aspire to pilldom,” Ed says.  “I’m getting pretty good at it, right?”

“Go take a shower,” Al says.  “Before I throw you in there, you brat.  You _little_ brat.”

“You’re dead to me,” Ed says, slinging himself up off the couch before his reservations morph into inertia and pin him down forever.  “So at least if you kill me at this point, we’ll both be dead.”

“You are the worst,” Al says.

Ed breezes past him.  “Whatever, Al.  You’re the one plotting fratricide with fancy clothes as the murder weapon.”

“Go get clean before I kick your sorry butt,” Al says.

Hard to argue with that.

  


* * *

  


Al’s right.  Ed’s spent years upon fucking years getting used to the fact that that’s usually the case, but—

But there’s a reason he didn’t get in the shower this morning even though he feels kind of sticky-gross from yesterday.

If he doesn’t think about it—

If he just doesn’t _think_ about it—

The human brain’s obscenely powerful, and his has more horsepower than most—if anyone can slam an iron vault door shut on a specific room of specific thoughts—

It’s fucked up.  It’s fucked up that someone could treat him in a crappy way like that, and then _he’s_ the one who feels bad about it—

It’s fucked up that when someone treats you like shit, that’s how you feel.  It’s fucked up that someone can change an essential facet of how you see yourself by imposing some stupid fucking idea—

He doesn’t want Verso to have that over him.

He doesn’t want the fucked up things that Verso thinks of him to have any traction in his own stupid head—

He turns his back on the mirror and strips off his clothes and balls them up and sets them on the top of the toilet tank.  If he just doesn’t—look, doesn’t focus on anything; if he just doesn’t let his brain conjure what Verso would’ve done if he’d stayed there any fucking longer—

He can totally take a shower without devoting any attention to the fact of his own nakedness.  That’s easy shit.  No problem.  He’ll just… not… notice.  Yeah.

He’s such a fucking mess.

He holds his left hand under the faucet until the water warms up.  At least it’s not the miserable, sweaty height of lousy fucking summer anymore, so a hot shower actually sounds appealing.

The water heats up; he pulls the little knob to divert it up to the showerhead and then adjusts the curtain, because it drives Al crazy when water spills onto the floor; and then he kicks their fuzzy mat into place; and then he steps in under the stream.

He deals with his hair first—it’s a multiple-family rat’s-nest and a five-alarm disaster from sleeping, so there’s some finger-detangling that has to happen before he can even dump shampoo in it and start scrubbing with his left hand. There’s something sort of soothing about running your nails back and forth across your scalp. Maybe that’s… maybe that’s something that—someone _else_ could do; maybe that’s something… date-y. Al plays with Winry’s hair all the time; maybe…

But after yesterday—

He’s not thinking about that—or, more specifically, not-thinking about it, on purpose, deliberately, for all the fucking good that usually does. He’s not thinking about Verso’s hand winding its way into his hair and fucking trapping him there, because pulling away would have hurt so much fucking more—because he probably wouldn’t even have had the leverage to try if Verso’s grip had been any fucking good; from the interminable stretch of time that that hand had spent lingering on that lunchroom bench between them, Ed’d had plenty of time to assess the damn thing, and it looked reasonably strong, and—

And he really doesn’t want to run his hand down his own fucking chest to spread the suds around.  He really doesn’t want to _think_ about the concept of pressure on his skin; he really doesn’t want to have to sweep the soap over his stomach, down his thighs—

And he’s avoiding the worst of it; he’s pretending like a _kid_ that if he just shoves his head under the covers, the monsters don’t exist.

Fuck that.  Fuck _that_ ; bodies are just—bodies; they’re just a conglomeration of individual fucking cells; the individual pieces are just anatomical necessities, and fuck people who impose all this meaning and significance and judgment and bullshit on what you do or don’t choose to do with yours.

He’s not going to think about it.  He’s not going to think about what Verso thinks of him—he’s not going to think of what Verso thinks he does; who Verso thinks he _is_ ; what Verso has imagined him doing with, to, or for frigging Roy—

Would it have been different, if Roy had been the one fucking looming over him, holding him against the wall?  If it’d been Roy’s hands—Roy’s mouth, Roy’s breath, Roy’s meaningfully-gleaming fucking eyes—

Would he have let Roy tear his clothes off and slide those hands all fucking over him—everywhere the shower water runs; everywhere that searing gaze might wander; anywhere he _wanted_ —

But every time he starts to think it, Roy blurs into Verso at the fucking edges, and then it’s like—

A branding iron.  Like a jolt of fucking electricity straight from the socket.  Like the rusted tip of an old nail instead of the pad of a fucking finger—

Fuck.

He squeezes his eyes shut and holds his breath and washes all the anatomical necessities that are getting dragged into this whole sordid fucking business as fast as he can—which is slower when he has to keep his right hand well fucking away so it won’t snag any hairs or sensitive skin or anything.  What a fucking pain in the fucking _ass_ , and he probably shouldn’t think about his ass too much right now—definitely shouldn’t think about Roy’s, not that he’s started to notice it lately or anything; not like he cares; not like it matters; not like—

_Adamant to get back on your knees—_

He bats some of the water at his hair and then shuts off the faucet and steps out and grabs blindly for his towel.  Fuck this.  Fuck all of this; fuck _everything_ —

He wrings the worst of the water out of his hair, slings the towel around his waist, and directs his stumble out into the hall.  On the upside, he probably just emerged from the dark doorway wreathed in a billowing cloud of steam, so at least that’s nice and dramatic and shit.

Al’s head appears out of the doorway to Ed’s room, although fortunately it looks like it’s still attached to Al’s neck, and presumably to the rest of him past that.

“That was fast,” he says.  “Did you scrub behind your ears?”

“Is he going to look behind my ears?” Ed asks.  His hair’s dripping everywhere; he crosses past his room to raid their little linen closet for another towel.  “You said this first date shit isn’t serious.”

“You might want to tell him ears are off-limits,” Al says.  “Just in case.”

Ed gives him a look over the left shoulder.

“I’m joking,” Al says.

“Jokes are funny,” Ed says.

“Your _face_ is funny,” Al says.

“Good,” Ed says.  “I can cancel this whole fucking thing.”

Al’s eyes do the flicker-of-concern thing.  It was uncanny the first time Ed saw the _armor’s_ eyes do that; it still fucking makes his heart soar to see it in the right ones—which is distracting as hell when Ed’s trying to be annoyed at his stupid brother.

“Do you want to cancel the whole thing?” Al asks.

“No,” Ed says, and most of him means it—there’s a little pocket of pure acid in his stomach that keeps flipping like a beached fish, but other than that, it’s true.  He tries to pat some of the physically improbable but nonetheless present quantity of water out of his hair.  “I just don’t want him all over my ears.”

“I would bet money you don’t have to worry about it,” Al says.

“What money?” Ed asks.  _Reluctant_ would be a gentle word to describe his journey down the hall to join his brother.  “You don’t have any money.”

“I’ll bet your money,” Al says.  “It’s for your own good.  Come in here and put this shirt on with these slacks.”

“I think you’re missing a step there,” Ed says.

“If you can’t remember to put on underwear before your pants,” Al says, “I’m not going to let you out in public, so it’s a moot point.”

“You’re brutal today,” Ed says.

“Sorry,” Al says.  “I’m worried about you.”

Ed frowns at him.

Al frowns back.

Then he points at the clothes that he laid out on the bed—the bed that he _made_ while Ed was in the shower.  Who even does that?  You’re just going to sleep in it again.

“Clothes first,” Al says.  “Argument later.”

Ed makes sure to sigh really loud before he goes to the bureau and grabs a pair of boxers off of the top of the pile of wrinkled cotton in the uppermost drawer.

Even now it’s hard not to hesitate—even when it’s just _Al_.  Al doesn’t care; Al’s never cared; Al’s seen every last centimeter of him a hundred-thousand times.  Al’s not just his brother; Al’s his other half.  Hiding from a part of yourself would be stupid even if it could be done.

Sometimes, late at night, when his guard’s down, he catches himself wishing—just for a second—that Al was back in the armor again.  He didn’t feel the same things back then.  He didn’t have any guts to twist and fire up with these stupid sensual urges; he didn’t have the biological makeup to foster physical desire.

They were more alike.

It made it so much fucking easier to cope with, so much easier to _ignore_ , because it was both of them; they were both like that; he wasn’t alone.

Ed doesn’t really mean it—not ever; not even for the instant where it flashes through his mind.  He doesn’t.

But sometimes it’s just so fucking hard to make his peace with being the only freak in the whole fucking family, or whatever’s left of it.

He drapes the towel over the footboard of his bed, climbs into his boxers, and then goes over and wriggles his way into the clothes Al picked.  They’re all slithery and shit, like nice fabric usually is.  It always sort of makes him feel like it’s trying to slide off of his skin to escape him, because it knows he’s not fancy enough to fit.

“Oh, good,” Al says.  “I thought I’d sized right, but I wasn’t sure.  You look great, Brother.”  Bullshit, but it’s enough trouble buttoning things with a metal hand when you’re not trying to talk at the same time.  “Tuck your shirt in.”

“You know who tucks their shirts in?” Ed asks as he finishes.

“People,” Al says.

“Nerds,” Ed says.

“Let me rephrase that,” Al says.  “People who want to look nice.”

“You mean _nerds_ who want to look nice,” Ed says.

“And people who just don’t want to sit on their shirttails,” Al says.  “And people who have nice belts on that they want other people to see.  And all of that is beside the point, because you _are_ a nerd.”

“But I don’t want to look nice,” Ed says.

Al gives him the _Brother, what the actual flipping heck_ look, trademark pending.

“He’ll start expecting it,” Ed says.  “He’ll think I’m going to show up to work looking presentable or some shit.”

“To the best of my knowledge,” Al says, “General Mustang does not believe in miracles.”

Ed scowls at him.

Al blinks innocently.

“Tuck in your shirt, Brother,” he says.

“You should enlist,” Ed says as he gets into his socks by way of some extremely ungainly hopping, “so you can be Führer someday and order everybody around instead of just me.”

“You’re more fun,” Al says.  “And the populace would probably revolt if I made them all tuck in their shirts.”

“As well they fucking should,” Ed says.  “Where’s my good belt?”

Al holds out an extremely boring one with only a couple of disappointingly subtle silver studs on it.  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

Ed snatches the offering out of Al’s hand.  “You fucking liar.  You hid it.”

Al’s sunny smile is the mark of a fucking demon.  “I can’t believe you would accuse me of such a heinous act of—”

“Just for that,” Ed says, “I’m tucking in _half_ the fucking shirt.”

Judging by Al’s aghast expression, he just won this round.

  


* * *

  


Victory is short-lived.

He knows several people who would have something to say about the phrasing of that if he’d been dumb enough to utter it aloud.

The point is, though, that he ends up lying on the couch, staring at the ceiling, while he waits for seven to roll around.

It’d probably be fine if he was just staring, but he’s not.  He’s thinking.  And that’s when the trouble always starts.

He’s thinking about what he said—what he keeps saying, to himself and to Al, which nobody seems to hear.

This is pointless.  This is a bunch of fucking brouhaha over nothing—over what will be nothing in a matter of weeks, if not days.

He’s not what Roy’s looking for.

He’s not what Roy wants.

And for someone as driven and dedicated as Roy fucking Mustang, a distraction like this—a side thing, an alternative commitment—has to be worth it.

Ed isn’t.  He won’t be.  He’s just not—right.  He doesn’t know this stuff.  He doesn’t know what any of it means; he doesn’t know how to do shit.  He doesn’t know what to say.  He doesn’t know how it’s supposed to feel.

And he’ll probably hate it when he finds out.

That’s not fucking— _fair_.  Fair’s a stupid word; fair’s inherently ridiculous, but—

But if it wasn’t—if the concept of justice was realistic in the slightest; if there was actually a balance somewhere, and you could contribute to it—the last fucking thing Ed would want to do would be to hurt Roy Mustang with some stupid shit like this.  To get his hopes up and then drag them down, slowly—moment by moment of incomprehension and fucking failure—into the boiling tar pit where Ed’s psyche makes its miserable fucking home.

He knows that Al’s keeping track of time so that he doesn’t have to.  Is it sort of shitty that he trusts in that?  Is it sort of shitty that he relies on Al to handle all the mentally-present adult-ish shit on his behalf?  He’s supposed to be the older brother.  He’s supposed to be in charge, in control—he’s supposed to _get it_.  He’s supposed to feel like he’s putting pieces of the universe into their allotted places, like he’s building something deliberate and structurally sound—not like he’s fucking free-wheeling through open space, flailing around for a fucking handhold at the best of times, and the motion makes him sick—

“It’s a quarter past seven, Brother,” Al says.  “He’ll probably be here any minute—you could wait for him out front.”

Ed could do a lot of things.

But he’s not enough of an asshole to talk shit when Al’s doing him a favor.  He levers himself upright.  “Yeah.  Good idea.”

“Tuck your shirt in,” Al says, calmly now.  “ _All_ of it.  Do you want me to come with you?”

He is so, so, so much more than Ed has ever deserved.

“Nah,” Ed says.  And Al’s fucking earned it, a thousand and one times over; Al earns it every second of every stupid day—Ed tucks the stupid shirt in, _properly_ , and then tries not to look at it very closely so that he won’t feel like a fucking loser.  “I’m okay.  Thanks.”

He detects a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye, and then Al’s on him—both arms wrapped around him tight.

“Have fun,” Al says.  “Okay?  That’s the point, really.  Just—be you, relax, and have fun.”

Ed hugs him hard and then pats at his shoulder-blade to get him to let go.  After the shower, he left his hair down to dry—like fucking hell is he going outside with it like that, but he needs both hands to remedy the situation.  Al completely unnecessarily straightens his shirt collar while he ties his hair up, and then Al goes and fetches his black coat and brings it back to him.

“I’d say ‘don’t stay out too late’,” Al says, “but I think I’ve long since exceeded my allowance of clichéd parent statements for today.”

Ed takes the coat.  The coat will be good; it looks less weird to wear gloves with a coat on.  “I think you’ve got, like, one more left.”

Al grins at him.  “Be safe, honey.  I love you.”

Ed very, very gently punches his arm—with the left hand, of course.  “Shut up.  I love you, too.  I’ll see you later.”

He lets himself out as Al chirps a goodbye.  This’ll be over in five minutes, but maybe he’ll wander up and down the street for a little while to pass some time—Al’s probably been looking forward to an evening alone anyway, and it’ll seem less bad somehow if he pretends it took an hour or two to fuck it all up.

He’s trying to pull words out of the wispy haze of thoughts and shuffle them into the right order as he goes down the stairs, but that’s always just been so fucking hard for him—translating what he’s thinking into something he can _say_.

The upshot of that is, if he’s just sort of a blabbering, incoherent mess, it’ll get the point across even faster, since the point is that Roy should drop him like a hot fucking potato before either of them gets burned.

He kind of wants a baked potato now.  Or maybe fries.  Fuck.  Maybe he should let Roy take him to dinner and _then_ fuck this u—

What the hell is he thinking?  How shitty would that be?  _Yeah, cool, thanks for the free food and the emotional investment—by the way, this shit ain’t happening, so… ’bye._

Fuck and double-fuck and triple-fuck and several more on down the goddamn line.

When he comes out the front door of the complex, there’s already a shiny black car parked up against the curb.

His whole body wants to freeze up—and then turn tail and fucking run, probably.

But he’s not a coward.

He’s a lot of things, but he’s not too fucking craven to tell this like it is and suffer any consequences that he has to for it.  Not yet.

He shoves his hands into the pockets of his coat and cuts across the lawn to walk to the car.  The little cobblestone path that they put in winds around all over the place; it’s stupid-inefficient.  He needs to get this done.

Roy has the windows rolled down despite the fact that it hasn’t exactly been a balmy day to start with, and now the sun’s setting.  There’s enough light left for Ed to see that he’s smiling, though.

Fuck.  That sucks.  That _aches_ , deep in the fucking core of Ed’s body, because the dumb bastard’s actually happy to see him for some reason—happy this is happening; happy that he’s here; happy that they’re supposed to be doing this stupid thing together.

Ed doesn’t want to hurt him.  Ed doesn’t want to hurt anybody; he never does; but it’s better to hurt Roy a little bit now than to hurt him a lot later, isn’t it?  It’s better to get this fucking over with, with minimal casualties, before Roy puts some of himself into it and ends up with that much more to lose.

Ed tries really fucking hard to smile back.  Fuck knows how well it actually works when his whole chest cavity feels like a vacuum.

He opens the door and sits down in the passenger seat, and then he shuts the door again, and then he looks out through the windshield at the empty street and swallows twice.

“Can we talk for a second?” he asks.

Roy hears it—he knows Roy fucking hears it; Roy’s too goddamn smart not to.  Too intuitive.  Too sharp.  And it must put him on his fucking guard, because he pauses for a fraction of a second before he says, “Of course.”

Here’s Ed’s chance to be a fucking hero.  Here’s his chance to throw himself on the sword before it can cut either of them any deeper.

He folds his arms and stares at the dashboard of the car so that he won’t have to watch any people going by.

“I don’t think we should—do this,” he says.

It’s a good, long, full fucking silence.  Neither of them moves enough even to make the seat leather creak; not enough to raise a rustle of fabric or a shift of hair.  He can hear Roy breathing.  His own heartbeat’s deafening in his ears.

“All right,” Roy says, so softly it’s hard to hear him over the palpitations, and it isn’t until part of Ed relaxes that he realizes that he was preparing for—something.  Vengeance.  Anger.  Violence.  And that’s stupid; this is _Roy_ , but all the same— “Can I ask why?”

Ed wants to crush his eyes shut.  He wants to hide his face; he wants to make a break for it.  He wants this to be easier; anything in the fucking world that’d make it so that he doesn’t have to fight out every individual syllable to try to find a way to make Roy understand—

“I just don’t think it’s fair to you,” he says, measuring out the words.  “I mean—‘fair’ is bullshit, but—it wouldn’t be right.  Of me.  Because it’s just not going to go the way you want it to, in the long run, and the last thing I wanna do is waste your time.”

_The last thing I want to do is let you down, like I have let down everyone who’s ever loved me, and why did you have to go and try to put yourself into that category so I’d get a chance to fuck you over, too?_

Roy stays quiet for another moment, and when he speaks his voice stays low and level—like he’s talking to a cornered fucking animal.

“I don’t want it to go any particular way,” he says.  “And I honestly don’t think it would be a waste of my time at all.”  He leaves Ed just enough time to start fucking squirming before he goes on: “Why do you think it would?”

Ed takes a deep breath.  Can’t fucking chicken out now; he got himself into this, and now he has to disentangle himself, too.  A part of him wants to look over at Roy, and the rest would rather hurl itself out of a moving vehicle towards three other lanes of speeding traffic.

He doesn’t look.

“It’s an opportunity cost thing,” he says.  At least Roy’s dashboard is… clean.  Wiped-down-clean and also clean-lines-clean.  Simple.  Makes it easier to focus on what he’s fumbling to say.  “You… if you invest in this, you’re expecting a payoff that—manifests in certain types of circumstances, because that’s how it works.  And that’s—fine.  I understand that, and obviously it’s not your fault, or anything; you’re just—that’s how it goes.  That’s how it’s always gone.  That’s what it’s supposed to be _about_.”

“About sex, you mean,” Roy says.

Ed’s stomach contorts.  Probably it’s a good thing that he hasn’t eaten anything since the fucking cereal.  “Yeah.  And that’s okay; I’m not trying to question the trajectory of fucking human history here.  That’s how it works, and that’s how it’s always worked, and that’s how it’s meant to work.  That’s not the problem—you’re not the problem.”  He takes a breath.  “It’s me.  I’m the problem.  That’s what it is.”

“Edward,” Roy says softly.

“No, listen,” Ed ays, and his elbow jerks with the brain-muscle desire to wave his hand for Roy’s attention.  “It’s true.  That’s fine; I’m not being—dramatic or whatever.  I don’t fit.  I don’t fit in the designated patterns for human behavior, because of this… thing, whatever it is; because I don’t feel the same shit, and that’s—I mean, I can’t fix it; I’ve tried.  It’s a fact.  So that’s the basis we have to build all of our other actions and assumptions on, right?  And I think this action—”

He has to free up one hand so he can gesture between them.  He barely sees the motion of his own left arm out of the corner of his eye; his vision’s gone all hazily dashboard-centric, and not much else makes it in at the edges.  Probably best that way.  Best that he doesn’t have to process whatever’s happening on Roy’s face right now.  Best that he doesn’t have any concrete images to feel fucking guilty over later.

“This isn’t…” He clears his throat.  “It’s just not going to pan out.  Is the thing.  Because it’ll come to a point where you want things I can’t… do, or give, or be, or appreciate, or—whatever, and—and I just don’t want you to try, and care, and _want_ this thing, and then to turn around and find out it’s been shit all along, because that’s just… That’s what I _do_ , so it’s—” He takes a breath.  “That’s what I am.  I just fuck things up, if you give me half a fucking chance.  You know that.  And it’s—I mean, I’d try, I _would_ ; I really—I wish it could be…” He breathes again.  That’s something.  “I just wish that we… could.  Is all.  But it’s not realistic.  Because the reality is I’m just—I’m so fucking—I don’t know, isolated, backwards, fucking _wrong_ , that it’s like—I can’t even—I can’t even deal with people touching me right now; I can’t—I don’t know why you’d want to jump into this fucking quagmire shit I’m doing anyway.  For fuck’s sake, like, I can’t even do my fucking hair without attracting some skeevy-ass fucking sleaze guy and letting him get his fucking fingers all up in it—”

“What happened on Friday?” Roy asks.  “Was it more than I saw?”

“Nothing,” Ed says.  “No.  It’s just—that’s a symptom of the fucking sickness, is all.  I’m—it really does—it feels like I’m sick.  Like I’ve got some kind of fucking virus nobody else can see, and probably you can’t catch it, but like fucking hell am I gonna drag you into the plague tent and risk you getting my disease—”

“Ed,” Roy says, and there’s a steel to it so fucking bright and strong that Ed can’t help glancing at him—just quickly, just for a fraction of a second, dropping his eyes before the outline comes clear.  “You’re not diseased.  You’re not broken.  You’re not deficient.  You are _you_ , and you are what I want—all I want, all I’m looking for. I’m not going to ask you to change. I’m not going to ask you for anything you don’t want to offer. I know what I’m getting into, I promise—or at least the shape of it; I know where you’re coming from, and I don’t… care, Ed. None of that makes it any less important; none of that makes _you_ any less important.  All I want is to take you out for dinner and spend a little time with you as two people instead of a pair of officers.  That’s it.  If it leads somewhere else from there, that’s lovely, but I don’t… There isn’t any pressure, Ed. None. Not from me. I just want you to be precisely who and how you are—just in my company for the next few hours, if you can bear it.”

Another car goes by—loud, louder, engine roaring as it passes close by Roy’s door; then fading away.  The taillights gleam on the dashboard.  Ed listens to his own stupid fucking heartbeat and Roy’s significantly less-stupid breathing.  If he gets through this, he can just—crawl back upstairs and bury himself under the covers and lick the thousand tiny wounds until they don’t sting so bad.

“I told you,” he says, as steadily as he can.  “It’s not you.  I’m just—so fucking tired of—being a disappointment.  I don’t want to do it again.  I don’t want to do it to you.  I think—I mean, in the bigger scheme of it, I think—people like me probably should be alone.  It’s just easier for everybody.  It makes more sense that way.”  He reaches for the car door, and his hand’s not shaking at all, obviously; it’s just—some sort of ambient air wave thing.  “I bet if you went straight to Captain Hawkeye’s, you could pick her up and still make your reservation, and she deserves a nice dinner anyway, so—”

“She does,” Roy says.  “So do you.  May I buy you a steak and tackle the rest of this once you’ve torn your way through to dessert?”

Ed’s hand stays poised over the door handle.  His heart throbs once, twice—once more, twice more—and keeps on going.

“How do you even know I’m gonna order steak?” he asks.

“Hunch,” Roy says.  “And the fact that it’s plastered all over their menu that you should, because it’s phenomenal.”

“I’m not gonna give in to their shitty semi-subliminal advertising,” Ed says.

“There’s hardly anything subliminal about it,” Roy says.  “Some of it’s in red.”

Ed’s heartbeat is so agonizingly persistent it’s difficult to ignore.

“You’re making a mistake,” he says.  “I fucking mean it, Roy—you don’t know how deep this shit goes.”

“I suppose I don’t,” Roy says.  “But I’m volunteering… No, more than that.  I am _begging_ you to let me find out.”

Ed swallows.

“One dinner,” Roy says.  “Just tonight.  If you don’t want any more than that, it’s over with, and we don’t ever have to speak of it again.”

Ed breathes.

“Come on,” Roy says.  There’s a playful kind of note in it, but it’s still so—gentle.  Like he’s expecting Ed to bolt.  Which makes sense, actually, given that Ed’s whole body’s angled towards the door, and he’s watching the sidewalk like it’s liable to escape if he takes his eyes off of it for a second.  “What do you have to lose?”

Ed opens his mouth to start prying the top off of that fucking can of fucking wo—

“The steaks are so low,” Roy says.

Ed can’t help turning to fucking look at him.

Roy grins.

“Besides,” he says, “you went to the trouble of dressing for it already, didn’t you?  You look nice.”

That could’ve been a lot of other words—words with more weight, words with more meaning, words with connotations.  That could’ve been a lot of words that would’ve fallen like lead and shrapnel into Ed’s stomach and festered there forever.

Roy’s so fucking smart.

He doesn’t know what fanged and venomous creatures lurk in the murky waters he’s wading into, but maybe—

Maybe he knows enough.

Maybe he knows just enough to tread carefully, and he doesn’t mind if he gets bitten once or twice.

Ed swallows down the part of him that wants to say _The leeches alone are a fucking nightmare; don’t even start me on the eels_.

“You do, too,” he says.  “Look nice.  I mean.”

It’s always true, obviously—Winry once memorably remarked that Roy Mustang could make a paper bag look like haute couture, whatever the fuck that is, exactly—but it’s especially true when he’s wearing the gray vest and the narrow black tie like he is right now. It frames his face nicely. Any time he’s out of the uniform, Ed sort of has to do stupid double-takes at how fluid the movements of his shoulders are; their actual shape gets mostly lost under all the wool, and they’re… also nice. Nice shoulders.

“Thank you,” Roy says.  He reaches forward to put his hand on the keys where they’re still waiting in the ignition, and he raises his eyebrows at Ed.  “Shall we?  If you need a minute—”

“Just drive,” Ed says.  “Or maybe let me drive, since I hear you’re shit at it.”

“I’m not sure my seat goes up that far,” Roy says, and Ed fucking sputters, and Roy laughs—but so softly that it disappears under the growl of the engine almost immediately.

One dinner.  One dinner, and then Ed can bail, and they can both get out of this more or less unscathed.

  


* * *

  


“Is that the place?” Ed asks the second time they go by it.

“Ah,” Roy says, delicately, “yes.”

Ed watches as the front of the restaurant dwindles away in the side mirror again.  “So… you gonna park this thing, or what?”

“I have a confession to make,” Roy says.

Ed eyes him.  “Okay.”

“The last time I parallel-parked,” Roy says, “I may have put a substantial dent in the back bumper.  And might possibly have ruptured a fire hydrant.”

“‘Might possibly’,” Ed says.

“There’s really no definitive proof either way,” Roy says.

“I call bullshit,” Ed says.

Roy grins.  “How uncharacteristic.”

Ed scowls at him, and then points at the curb.  “There’s a spot right there.”

The grin segues seamlessly into a grimace.  “That’s… a bit… risky.  I’m sure something will open u—”

“Let me drive,” Ed says.

Roy blinks, but—probably fortunately—he’s primarily looking at the road, so it’s hard to judge the precise implication of the blinking.  “I wasn’t aware you could.”

“I can’t _legally_ ,” Ed says.  “I don’t know the rules, and I didn’t take the test or any of that crap.  But there’re about a billion janky-ass cars sitting around rusting in people’s yards back home, and nothing friggin’ else to do.”

“Fascinating,” Roy says, and he actually sounds like he means it.  “Do you mean to say that I could have turned this whole little fiasco over to you a long time ago?”

“Just pull up next to that one,” Ed says, leaning forward and pointing again before Roy misses another perfectly good fucking parking spot.  “I’ll handle it.”

For a long, long moment, the lack of a response makes him think Roy’s pissed off—that Ed stepped on his toes or impugned his driving skill and by extension his honor or some shit like that—but after a swift glance at each mirror in turn, Roy does exactly as he asked.

The last thing Ed wants to do is hold up traffic and get honked at, so the second the car stops moving, he jumps out and darts around the front of the hood.  Roy’s only just getting up when he comes around the corner—but that seems to suit the bastard fine, since he then proceeds to straighten his tie with one hand, hold the car door for Ed with the other, and half-bow as an unnecessary invitation.

“Thanks,” Ed says, because it’s what Al would want him to say.  “You weirdo,” he adds, because it’s what he wants to say.

“My dear Edward,” Roy says, because he’s also an _asshole_ , apparently, who enjoys watching Ed fight the hot rise of a flush, “it takes one to know one.”

For another thing, he’s a goddamn banter-cheater—he books it around to the other side to get to the passenger seat before Ed can cobble together a comeback.

“I can’t believe you trust me with your car,” Ed says.  He has to stretch a little—okay, kind of a lot—to reach the fucking pedals, but he’s not about to move the seat forward and give Roy a chance to comment.

“I trust you with a great deal more than that on a daily basis,” Roy says.  “Besides which, if anyone can do rotational momentum analyses in his head on the fly, I’m betting that it’s you.”

Ed puts this sucker in reverse and spins the wheel to angle himself.  “Once you’ve driven backwards between enough barns and houses with about two inches to spare on each side, you don’t really have to do the calculations anymore.  S’instinct.”

“That’s probably what I’m missing,” Roy says as Ed whips the little black chariot—which drives so damn smooth it really ought to have choral accompaniment every time you make a turn—in at a sharp fifty degrees and then swings the front to even it out.

“Nah,” Ed says.  “What you’re missing is Winry teaching you how to drive a tractor.  And then Granny Pinako teaching you again, from scratch, so that you don’t kill anybody doing it Winry’s way.”  He straightens the wheel, takes them a few inches forward, and then stops the motherfucker and pulls the lever that looks like a parking brake.

“Good Lord,” Roy says, opening his door and looking at the curb.  “That was remarkable.”

“I’ll tell Granny you said that,” Ed says.  He pulls the keys out of the ignition and holds them out to Roy.  “I don’t think they let kids get bored enough up here, that’s all.”

Roy reaches out to take the keys, and their fingers brush together, and Ed’s chest tightens up at the prospect of what else that could mean or do or lead to—

But Roy just smiles slightly, pockets the keys, says “Shall we?”, and gets out of the car.

Ed climbs out.  He’s not fucking sure how this part goes; he’s not fucking sure how any of this goes.  The uncertainty puts him on-edge, and then knowing that he’s on-edge puts him _more_ on-edge, because he doesn’t want to be an asshole out of anxiety; that’s some fucked up shit—

Roy’s waiting for him up on the sidewalk.  Roy has his hands folded behind his back—which, like the word “shall”, should make him seem all stilted and awkward and overly formal and shit, but which is instead sort of… dashing.  Is that the word?  That’s the word Al would use, at any rate.  The fucking vest-and-tie combination isn’t hurting matters either, unless the _matters_ in question encompass Ed’s stupid brain gradually going haywire.

Roy extends an arm towards him, and Ed manages to overcome the impulse to hesitate.  He follows the direction of the gesture and steps past Roy, starting for the restaurant—waiting for the hand to sweep in and touch his shoulder or his back or his arm or something; steeling himself for the impact so he can pretend the brush of someone else’s fingers doesn’t fucking set his stomach acid to a rapid boil—

But Roy’s hand never makes contact.  He just sort of—ushers Ed along, with just enough of a grandiose kind of air that Ed has no choice but to roll his eyes and… relax.

Only a little, but it counts.

Roy does a hilarious little borderline-skipping quickstep to get to the restaurant door fast enough to hold it open.

“After you,” he says.

“Why?” Ed asks—though he’s not too much of a jackass to be going through as he says it.  “Are there cannibals inside?  Or is it wild animals?  Or…”

This restaurant’s foyer has two sets of double doors for some reason.  The instant Ed opens one side of the inner set to return the favor, he gets walloped in the face with a swell of absolutely fucking _transcendent_   smells.

“Thank you,” Roy says, sauntering through more smugly than anybody’s got any right to be able to walk.  It shouldn’t be possible to have smugness evident in the very length of your stride.  “Or what?”

“I forget,” Ed manages.  Roy pauses a few steps ahead, and Ed realizes he’s still standing there like a moron, clinging to the door handle and sniffing a bit, so he hastens to catch up.  “Um—what—how much can I eat?  How much can you afford?  Do they have a—like, a sampler, or something?  So you can try everything?”

“I’m not sure,” Roy says, and Ed would ask him what he’s so fucking happy about, but there’s something sort of weirdly, charmingly pure about the smile, so he leaves it alone.  “I propose that we find out.”

Roy continues sauntering right on up to the stand where a woman in black is paging through a ledger.  She looks up and smiles.  “Good evening, sir.”

Ed’ll just… stand here and continue to be invisible.  That’s cool.  Honestly, he kind of prefers it.

“Good evening,” Roy says, and the _shall_ -slinging fucker makes that sound natural, too.  “I should have a reservation for two under Mustang.”  He glances up at the fancy-ass clock on the fancy-ass wall and winces.  “I’m afraid we’re a bit late because of my ineptitude at parking.”

“‘Ineptitude’ is sort of harsh,” Ed says.  “‘Incompetence’, maybe.”

Roy presses his lips together in the way that means he’s suppressing a smile.  “How kind.  Thank you.”

The maître’d lady is also trying not to laugh as she gathers up two menus. Ed can’t fucking wait to get a hold of that thing. “Not a problem at all. Right this way.”

She leads them over to a little square table off along one of the walls—the whole place is done up in white and aged gold, with all these winding pillars and draping fabric and antiquey décor and shit. It looks like a museum as much as a restaurant, so it’s probably a damn good thing that it smells so distinctly like the latter, just so that nobody gets confused.

Either by sheer stupid fucking luck or because Roy’s talent for emotional intelligence extends further than any human being’s intuition should, Ed ends up at the table first, and Roy’s a couple full steps behind him, so he gets a second to pick which seat he wants.

Not that he has to _pick_ , exactly—he sits down with his left side towards the dining room so that his right arm’s up against the wall.  As a left-handed-by-default person, it’s going to be easier to maneuver his elbow anyway; on top of which somebody’s bound to notice him wearing one fucking glove if he doesn’t tuck that hand discreetly under the table.  Having a glove on the left while trying to execute small-motor skills like utensil manipulation is just too much of a pain in the ass, but the only thing that draws more attention than wearing two gloves in a food-service facility is wearing only one.  It’s like a fucking neon sign with a giant flashing arrow, pointing to his hand and saying _Hey, this is ugly and fucked up, so I’m hiding it, okay?_

If Roy notices any of the distant smoke from this internal battlefield, he doesn’t say anything—just slides into the seat opposite more gracefully than anybody’s got any right to be _ever_ , let alone when they’re shifting their own balance, and then flashes a winsome smile at the lady when she hands him his menu.

“Thank you,” he says.

“Thanks,” Ed adds when she gives him the second one, which seems like something of an understatement considering the incalculable power of awesome food selection that she just bestowed upon him.

“You’re welcome,” she says to both of them.  She sets a third little padded folder down.  “Here’s your wine list.”

Ed looks at Roy.

Roy looks back.

“Thank you,” Roy says.

“Your server will be with you shortly,” the maître’d says, and then she strides away.

“I keep meaning to ask _you_ ,” Roy says, “whether you’ll be with me shortly.”

“I’m with you right fucking now,” Ed says, resisting the extremely tempting urge to rise to it.  Not that he has to _rise_ in a literal sense, obviously, since he’s a perfectly normal fucking size.  He tilts his head towards the wine-thing.  “You’re off the hook now, y’know.”

Roy picks the folder up, and the movements of his fingers are so smooth and distinct that Ed gets sort of mesmerized and doesn’t really notice until it’s already over that Roy’s folding the thing shut and setting it down.

“Be that as it may,” Roy says, “I’d much prefer to be in complete control of my faculties tonight.”  He pauses, then lifts the little folder up again. “Unless you want—?”

Something that would hit him hard and fast and bowl his anxious brain right the fuck over might make it easier to enjoy this… But like Al pointed out, Ed’s never been in the habit of doing shit the easy way, and there’s no point starting now.

“I only drink when I’m planning to do backflips off the diving board,” he says.  “Then I can ignore that voice in my head trying to convince me that my neck is breakable.”

“You may want to start listening to that one,” Roy says, laying the folder down flat again.

“A rational awareness of mortality is for the weak,” Ed says.  He does his best impression of Al’s _why-yes-I-_ am _-slightly-evil_ smile.  “Or the old.”

Roy pantomimes being stabbed in the heart.  That’s one of his favorites these days.

Ed snickers.

“If you’re done abusing me,” Roy says after a few moments of indicating dribbles of blood by drawing squiggly imaginary lines down his chest, “you should really take a look at that menu.”

Ed gives him a glare to make sure he knows this isn’t a surrender, then cracks the fucker open.

Oh—

 _Yes_.

Yes, this was worth the fucking trouble; this was worth every fucking _minute_ of misery yesterday, last night, this afternoon—

Roy wasn’t kidding; there’s nothing about the spread of descriptions of this potential feast that anyone would qualify as subtle in the least.  The fabled steak features prominently: it is, apparently, _pomegranate-rubbed_ , which is a hilarious mental image.  Significantly more importantly, it comes on _a bed of roasted russet potatoes_ , which is a challenging series of sounds even to think, and which also sounds like the kind of place Ed wants to sleep for the rest of his life.  His mouth is a fucking monsoon.  He may get dehydrated from salivating and slip into unconsciousness before their food ever comes.

“Steak,” he manages.  “What else should I get with it?”

“They have these little lamb skewers that are worth going to hell for,” Roy says, leaning across the table to point to the extensive appetizer section on Ed’s menu.  True to Roy’s earlier warnings, Ed was having trouble paying attention to anything but the ad for that fucking _steak_ , since it’s blazoned all over the damn place in a maroon-red color that immediately draws the eye.  Clever bastards.  Ed thinks he loves them.  “And the stuffed olives are excellent, although I get the sense you’d prefer meat.”

“When it’s an option,” Ed says, trying to make his eyes focus on comprehending the descriptions rather than getting hung up on tantalizing words like _spicy_ and _savory_ and _garlicky_ , “why wouldn’t you eat it?”

“A perfectly valid question,” Roy says, sitting back.

Ed manages to tear his gaze away from the seductive lettering and look over.  “What are you having?”

“Whatever you want second-most after the steak,” Roy says, gesturing in a typically vague kind of way towards the table and the menu and possibly the universe at large.  “So that you can try it.”

Ed stares at him.

Roy blinks, looking faintly surprised before he schools his whole face back into the sort of genial neutrality he favors most of the time.  “Is something wrong?”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “Your priorities.  They’re jacked up.”

Genial neutrality breaks for another grin, and it’s—mind-boggling, actually.  Mind-boggling and a little unnerving and a lot hypnotic.  Ed’s never seen Roy genuinely smile so much—so frequently and so consistently, like it’s bursting out of him every time he lets his guard down for a second.

“I told you,” Roy says.  “Everything on the menu is extraordinarily good.  There’s no way for me to lose.  Besides which—you’re likely to pick something I wouldn’t have chosen for myself, so I’ll be broadening my horizons at the same time.”

Ed eyes him.  “You call yourself a strategist, but you’re trying to tell me no-lose situations exist?”

“Only here,” Roy says, spreading his hands munificently.  “That’s part of the magic of this place.”

“The other part is that they rub pomegranates on literally everything,” Ed says, “apparently.”

“Vigorously,” Roy says.  “That’s the only way the pomegranates will cooperate.”

“It’s only fair,” Ed says.  “They’re holding up most of the menu.”

“I wonder if we can leave a tip specifically for the pomegranates,” Roy says.  “They deserve to be recognized for all of their hard work.”

“Maybe we can send a note with our server,” Ed says.  “ _Dear pomegranates: we appreciate your sacrifices in the name of making fucking awesome food_.”

What a bizarre conversation to be having with your boss-slash-date.

Ed fucking loves it.  It’s like talking with Al; you can just go off in some weird-ass fucking direction, and it’s _fun_ , and—

And he thinks he might just be getting the point of this shit right now.

Roy’s doing the crinkly-eye grin that usually leads up to a laugh, and Ed’s chest just—tightens, and his guts follow suit, and that can’t be normal.  His stomach heats up, and so does the inside of his throat, and the collection of abnormal sensations is not exactly the most encouraging sign he can think of as far as the way this thing’s going, but—

But maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be.  Maybe you’re supposed to feel unbalanced and feverish and a little bit ill.  Except don’t people always claim to enjoy this shit?

Then again, ‘people’ tend to be pretty unreliable about that sort of thing.

He’s just going to have to roll with it.

For the first time in a long, long, long-ass fucking while, that doesn’t sound so bad.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So! First off, this has a bit of The Kissing in it, so if that is not your jam, cut out before the end. ♥
> 
> Second, I started on the next part of this series (which is from Roy's POV for a change!) a little while back, but I sort of wrote myself into a corner, and now I'm working on Loud and Clear, so idk when I will finish it. But there will eventually be more. ♥

Even if the food wasn’t so brain-meltingly, tongue-explodingly, tastebud-tinglingly fucking fantastic, this dinner would still be more than worth however much Roy’s about to pay for it.

Right after they ordered, Roy asked him what Al was working on for class, and explaining that took almost half an hour while tearing through some obnoxiously good bread, and Roy had a bunch of genuinely good commentary and shit.  And then their food came, and Ed was lost to the entire universe for the first several bites, and once he sort of spiraled back down to settle more or less solidly on the planet again, Roy asked him what the best thing he’d read lately was, which required explaining the qi book—which Ling straight-up fucking translated for him, _personally_ , which makes it twice as important, and it was pretty important to start with—

And then Roy says something that makes Ed forget about all the pomegranates that gave their lives, or at least their rubbing, for this steak:

“I can read Xingese.”

Ed stares at him.  “You—can?”

Roy makes an extremely unilluminating gesture that involves pressing his palms together like he’s about to do a transmutation, then parting them, then sort of vaguely waving them both.  “Not expertly, by any means, but I’m… conversational, I suppose.  The equivalent of conversational for literacy.”

Ed can’t think of a damn thing to say.  The full extent of his brainpower is going into trying to conceptualize the sheer fucking quantity of books that just became readable.

His face must betray the beatific excitement he’s feeling, because Roy looks faintly startled and continues with the vague hand-waving thing. “It’s really not… My mother was Xingese, and my foster mother thought it would be a travesty if that part of my personal culture died with her, so she convinced her friend at the tailor shop to teach me Xingese as soon as I was old enough to read Amestrian as well. My speaking is probably rather embarrassing, but—I could get around, at least in the capital. My understanding is that the dialects in the countryside are so different that it’s essentially another language altogether.”

“You realize,” Ed says, slowly, which is the best his still-whirring brain can do, “that I’m about to conscript you as my study buddy from now until forever.”

“Oh, dear,” Roy says, but he doesn’t exactly look intimidated.  Smug, more like.  Maybe disproportionately amused.

“I mean it,” Ed says.  “I’m gonna ask Ling and Mei to mail me every damn book they can find about alkahestry and the history of science over there, and then I’m going to make you sit down and read them all to me.  So you better brush up on your alchemy vocab.”

Roy sets his elbow on the edge of the table, which Ed’s been told one too many times is an unmannered farm kid thing, but he forgets to point it out because of the shitty, horrible, no-good way that Roy is grinning.  How does he make petty fucking facial expressions brighter than that moment when rainclouds part and the sun starts shining and all the puddles gleam like glass?

Bastard.

“I guess I had better,” Roy says.  “I could always teach _you_ Xingese, and then you could read them all yourself.”

“Good luck,” Ed says.  “I’m crap with languages.  I tried learning Cretan one weekend and didn’t get anywhere.”

Roy looks at him.

Ed can’t help fucking squirming a little.  Roy looks at him ever so slightly differently these days, and it’s… well, it makes him feel kind of inexplicably, increasingly… antsy.  That’s all.

And warm.  Too warm.  Uncomfortably warm.

“It’s going to take more than one weekend,” Roy says.  “I don’t think that’s a reflection on your faculty for languages so much as on your methodology.”

“I had the book and stuff,” Ed says.  “It said thirty days, so I figured three should be enough.”

The grin has softened into a smile that melts the antsiness into just more fucking heat.  “That is very, very you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Ed asks.  “Usually other people’s timelines don’t apply to me.  It’s not, like, an arrogance thing; it’s just… true.”

Roy is toying with his fork in a way that is bizarrely arresting—he’s not even doing anything weird or particularly elaborate; he’s just… turning it over in his fingertips.  Really slow.  He’s awfully fidgety with pens, too, come to think of it; maybe that’s the physical manifestation of him mulling over shit.

“It is fascinating,” Roy says, “that you’re aware of your own general brilliance and nearly insurmountable capacity for just about anything that strikes your fancy, and at the same time you’re convinced that you don’t matter, and that no one finds you admirable.”

Well, that fucking stings—distantly, though, like a lot of shit these days.  Barely any of it filters through the layer of fog around all of the familiar stimuli; it takes something jarring as hell to startle him out of the mist.  The things he’s already thought about and articulated in his head don’t penetrate.  It doesn’t hurt as much to hear it when you already know.

He tries to trot out a good scowl anyway.  “It’s not like basic fucking intelligence fixes anything.  You have to have all kinds of other shit—impetus and motivation and social skills and…”   _An uncanny ability to fit into situations regardless of their character, like you do—like I could never do if I fucking practiced with a step-by-step instruction manual for a million years, because I’m broken, don’t you_ get _that by now?_ “…stuff.  I don’t know.”

Roy waves his hands again, which at least is marginally less distracting than the way his fingertips were playing on the handle of the fork.  “No, no.  I know.  Forgive me; this is supposed to be fun.  And I assure you I’m guilty of a thousand far more egregious feats of psychological contortion in my own life.”

“Where the hell do you even get words like that from?” Ed asks.  “You just—open your mouth, and they’re _there_?”

Roy smiles slightly.  “I suppose so.  It’s a gift.  Or, as my mother used to call it, ‘Shut your trap and just say whatever the hell you’ve talked six times around.’”

“I think six is too high,” Ed says.  “I’ve only ever heard you talk around something twice before you got to the point.  Maybe three times, but that’s special.”

Roy arches an eyebrow, and the corner of his smile lifts with it.  “May I have that in writing?”

“What, so I can get in the middle of arguments between you and your mom?” Ed asks.  “No fuckin’ thanks.”  Roy laughs. Because he’s a weirdo. Which Ed knew, obviously, but he didn’t realize it extended to shit like laughing at Ed’s jokes.  He’s pretty sure that’s an indication that the disease is fatal, and Roy’s past help.  “You don’t have time to teach me Xingese anyway,” he says.  “I know your schedule now, so don’t try to tell me that you do.”

“Alas,” Roy says.  “Foiled by my own stratagems yet again.”

“You and the _words_ ,” Ed says.

Roy almost-pauses—he never really waits, and he only ever hesitates for a second, but if you’re really watching, occasionally you can catch him.

“Would you like me to stop?” he asks.

“No,” Ed says.  He means it.  “Keeps it interesting.  Plus I really have to pay attention if I want to have any idea what the hell you’re going on about.”

Roy’s cultivated neutrality breaks instantly into another blade-bright grin.  “In that case, I’ll have to work on making my sentences even more convoluted.  The last thing in the world that I want is for you to get bored of me.”

Ed eyes him.  “You sure you haven’t been drinking?”

Roy smiles thinly.  “I’m sure.”

Ed eyes him harder.  “Okay, fine.  But if you wanna know whether or not I get bored of people, you can ask friggin’ Winry.  I’m pretty sure automail’s the only thing she’s ever talked about since she was five.”

“No danger of that here, at least,” Roy says.  “I can’t begin to understand the nuances of how it works.”

“It took me a while to get with the program,” Ed says.  “But partly—or a lot, I guess—that was because I just sort of didn’t want to know any more about it than I had to, because I didn’t want to think about the reason that I had to know as much as I did.”

Shit.  That was, like, way too honest.  What the hell was in that steak, other than pomegranates with aspirations to grandeur?

“I considered never doing alchemy again,” Roy says.

Ed’s heart practically fucking stops.

“After Ishval,” Roy says.  “After what I used it for, and what I did.  I never wanted to face that capacity within myself ever again.”

That is a big thing to say—a significant thing, very deep and very serious and very far from the ordinary smalltalk chitchat bullshit.

And it occurs to Ed that there aren’t that many people Roy could’ve said it to.

Armstrong gets it.  Marcoh would.  They were in the exact same hell he was, tangled in the inescapable intricacy of the same damn spiderweb, feeling all the strands winch tighter every time they moved.  And the thing that had made them special for their whole lives—the thing that had given them meaning; the thing that gave them power; the thing they loved—was the reason they were trapped.  It was the reason that their options were to act the part of a killing machine, or to be cut down so that someone colder could finish up the job.

The thought of transmuting anything had made Ed sick for a long, long time after that night in the basement.  But he’d known—even then, even with the bile creeping up the back of his throat and tickling his tonsils until he had to scramble one-handed for the window to try to let the air in to _breathe_ —that it was his only way out.  It was the only way forward.  It was the only recourse he’d ever had, so by definition it was the only one that he had left.

“But that’s the thing,” he says.  “It’s a capacity for _anything_.  Alchemy’s a blank slate.  And I guess—I mean, I guess maybe a lot of us have to fall down hard before we understand what that kind of power really means.  How we have to hold ourselves back, or we’ll end up like…” Kimblee. Scar. The Homunculus.  The people that they themselves used to be—thinking that alchemy was the exception to its own rules, and the power came without a price.

“It’s a tool,” Roy says, smiling slightly, “just like any other.  And it’s what we do with it that counts.”  He sits back and clears his throat, shaking his head, and the smile twists rueful.  That shouldn’t look so… good.  Nice.  Sweet.  “That was—forgive me.  I seem to be about as skilled with conversation tonight as I am at parking all the time.”

Ed shrugs, trying to lighten shit up again—it’s the sort of thing Al’s got a knack for, which usually trips Ed up faster than a thicket of ropes, but it’s worth a try when Roy’s sitting there looking like _that_.  “I think if either of us acted normal, everybody’d freak.  I’d think you were possessed, probably.”

“Me, too,” Roy says calmly.  “In any case—”

The waiter appears behind Roy’s right shoulder—and even from where Ed’s been _looking_ that direction, it’s awfully fucking sudden and eerily fucking silent; maybe the guy trained for this by waiting tables in Xing, and—

And Roy’s whole body tenses, tight enough that the tendons in his throat stand out, and his fingers curl around the handle of his knife until the knuckles blanch.

While the shadow-ninja-waiter sweeps around to the side of their table properly and starts offering a dessert menu in exchange for their empty plates, Ed watches Roy force himself to relax, one muscle at a fucking time—and he covers it amazingly well, sure; but Ed’s been watching Roy for a long damn time.  Longer than he wants to think about, probably.  And a lot of the tells have come clear over the years, and a lot of the veils and layers that used to hang between the two of them have slipped away.

Roy maintains such impeccable fucking pleasantness that Ed can’t tell if _he_ knows that Ed saw his reaction.  Is he—embarrassed?  Or is it the tired sort of hurt, too fucking dull now to peak into humiliation after all this time?

Ed’s fucking heart aches for him, and that is a _weird_ feeling.  That is foreign and beautiful and strange; he wants to—

He wants to protect Roy Mustang.  From whatever’s out there, whatever’s in him—from whatever lingers in the corners of Roy’s head, waiting to catch him when the moment’s right.  He wants to save Roy Mustang from himself.

Shadow-ninja-waiter ghosts away as Ed’s brain churns over that one—and his stomach does, a little, too, but not with any force.

Roy holds out the small, folded menu.  “If there’s anything that tempts you,” he says, “feel free, but I was thinking… Have you been to that new creamery in Andrews Square?”

“Yeah,” Ed says, trying to make sure the sarcasm drips down his chin and burns a couple holes in the table.  “Me and the six-thousand friends I hang out with in all that spare time I’ve got.”

Roy grins, propping his chin on the hand not waving the menu.  “I sympathize.  One of my sisters blackmailed me into taking her.”

Ed takes the menu and half-glances at it, since that seems like the mannerly thing to do or some shit.  There’s cheesecake.  Is cheesecake Cretan?  Maybe if you put pomegranate in it, it is.  There’s pomegranate in _everything_.  And honey.

“I didn’t know you had siblings,” Ed says.  “They speak Xingese, too?  We could start a book club.”

“In all of that spare time you have,” Roy says.  “And I’m afraid not—they’re all from around here.  My foster mother collected quite a lot of us.”

On the wings of a casual thought, it seems weird to imagine Roy as anything other than a headstrong, independent only child.

Settling into a second, though, the way he treats his team makes perfect sense.

“Huh,” Ed says.  He gives the menu another cursory onceover and then sets it down.  “If it’s good enough to blackmail you over, I figure their shit’s probably worth the walk.”

Roy gestures munificently—that’s probably the word he’d use, anyway—to the menu.  “On the other hand, if you’d like two desserts, I’m not about to stop you.  I think the miracle of your metabolism can handle it.”

“I don’t wanna empty your _whole_ wallet,” Ed says.  “Just, like, half of it.”

“Can we keep it to a third?” Roy asks.  “Don’t answer that; I know better.”

“Whatever,” Ed says.  “I haven’t gone on a real expensive mission in forever, because…” Well, shit.  “Because you haven’t given me any, I guess.”

“I’m getting paranoid in my old age,” Roy says—completely straight-faced, the bastard.  “I suppose averting an apocalypse will do that for you.”

“I like the indefinite article,” Ed says.  “Implies we might have to deal with more fucking apocalypses later on.”

Roy smiles, arching an eyebrow at him, which is so unfair it’s way past words.  “Let’s just say I wouldn’t be especially startled,” he says.  “You happen to attract trouble like honey draws flies.”

Ed holds up the menu.  “Around here, honey just draws pomegranates.  Everything does.  Where do they even get them all?”

“Maybe they grow them out back,” Roy says, perfectly calmly.  “Or on a special farm, so that they can select for the ones with the most rubbing potential, since I imagine the effort involved in rubbing an intractable pomegranate—”  Ed has been pressing his lips together hard to hold in the laugh, and right then, the waiter comes back up to their table, and Roy flashes a completely normal smile. “I think we’re a bit full.  Could we have the bill, please?”

“You didn’t have to lie,” Ed says when the waiter vanishes into the ether yet again.  That dude’s a smidgeon fucking creepy, come to think of it. “Could’ve just told him we’ve hit a critical threshold of pomegranate consumption, and we just can’t take any more.”

“I don’t want to hurt his feelings,” Roy says.  “What if he’s a pomegranate advocate?  What if they’re his friends?”

Ed stares at him.

Roy stares back.

Ed snickers.

Roy’s whole face relaxes into another easy grin, and Ed wonders, more than a little bit despite himself, how many people have grazed the zany-weird-silly sense of humor underneath Roy’s suave routine—and how many of them have summarily rejected it.

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “Guess you’re right.  All my pomegranate friends are sticklers about that kind of shit.”

“Shh,” Roy says, waving his hand in a detectably _cut-it-off_ kind of a motion this time.  “The fruit sympathizer is coming back.”

Ed’s too busy trying to seal his own mouth shut instead of laughing way too loud for a fancy-ass restaurant again to notice Roy reaching for his wallet until it’s too late.

The guilt sort of sticks in the center of his chest—gooey-hot and rising to contract around his throat; he has to get some words out before it strangles him silent, but first the fucking waiter has to leave, because he doesn’t want to make a goddamn scene, but—

“You didn’t have to—do that,” he says the instant shadow-ninja slips out of earshot.

Roy, who’s fitting his wallet back into his pocket, glances up, looking genuinely surprised for a fraction of a second before he regains control of every last muscle of his face.  That’s one of the tricks—you have to watch him extremely closely right at that first moment for the real response.

“I wanted to,” Roy says.  “Besides, I’ve always felt that it’s only fair for the person who picked the venue to pay.”  He arches an eyebrow and starts to tilt one of those dangerous fucking ever-so-slightly-crooked smiles.  “It’s nothing to do with control and everything to do with courtesy.”

Ed had sort of assumed they were both in on the _ha, ha, gonna eat you out of house and home_ joke as being, in fact, a joke.  Somehow he hasn’t learned his fucking lesson about assuming that other people can read his mind.  And his mind is _broken_ —jumbled, jagged, fucked-up, way past help.  Even if it was written in a comprehensible language, nobody would risk touching anything that fragmented for fear of slicing their fingertips to ribbons.

“I just don’t want you to think I expect you to buy me expensive fucking food after everything you’ve already done for me,” he says.  “For us.  Me and Al.”

“I know you too well to think that for a second,” Roy says, and there’s a different angle to the smile now—a gentler one.  How the hell does he do that?  “Consider it a very small personal contribution to Alphonse’s tuition.”

Ed eyes him for a long, long second.

“You’re going to do well in government,” he says.

Roy laughs—lightly, brightly, loudly—and it resonates through Ed’s chest like pure fucking photons and warms him from the inside out.

“Did you doubt me?” Roy asks.

“I ain’t stupid,” Ed says.

“No one,” Roy says, “has ever been fool enough to suggest something like that.”

“Well,” Ed says.  “Nobody except Al.”

“Siblings don’t count,” Roy says.

“Al counts,” Ed says.  “He’s smarter than I am, so he’d know.”

Roy looks at him, quirking another of those incomprehensible little smiles.  “I’m not sure if I believe that.”

“You can believe whatever you want,” Ed says.  “That doesn’t make it true.”

“Now who sounds like a politician?” Roy asks.

Ed sticks his tongue out.

And Roy just—laughs.  The same laugh again, open and unfettered and unafraid, and Ed’s ribcage just keeps expanding until he thinks he’s going to fucking split.

  


* * *

  


There’s some bad news about Roy: apparently, when lives or the world-as-people-know-it aren’t on the line, he’s one of those people who walks really fucking slow, like he doesn’t actually care about _getting_ anywhere.

Maybe it’s not such a bad thing.  It’s a nice night, and their route towards Andrews Square takes them through the best park in Central—it’s all wrought-iron streetlamps and windy paths and big swathes of greenery and shit; it’s always been Ed’s favorite.  All the rolling grassy hills kind of remind him of home.

But his nerves won’t settle now—now that they’re alone.  It’s different than sitting in a restaurant, under other people’s eyes; different than the strange safety of being in public; there’s no one around, and Roy could—

He could do a lot of things.  But he won’t.  Because this is fucking _Roy_ , and Roy won’t fucking hurt him.  Not on purpose, anyway.

Slowly, slowly—maybe it’s a strategy thing; maybe Roy’s trying to give them time to work up an appetite for ice cream, like Ed’s a normal person who has to _work up_ anything when it comes to dessert—they saunter up along the main little pathway, cresting the hill where you can just see the umpteenth city fountain topped with a big fucking statue of an officer on a horse.

And Ed can’t think it—has to think of anything else; anything but sitting on the edge of the one near Rebecca’s parents’ place on that miserable fucking day; anything but the dead weight of that absolute certainty that Hawkeye was going to abandon him; anything but the burgeoning realization that he couldn’t even be fucked-up right.

“Jeez,” he says.  “Anybody ever counted how many of those fucking things we’ve got?”

“Someone has to commemorate the greatest murderers of the modern age,” Roy says.

It’s probably a good thing they’re walking so slow, or Ed would’ve just tripped over his own feet.  So much for lightening the fucking mood with smalltalk and shit.

“Good Lord,” Roy says before he can comment.  “Apparently I should legally change my middle name to ‘Buzzkill.’”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “You don’t have enough paperwork in your life right now.”  He wants to ask what Roy’s middle name is.  Why the hell would it matter?  He needs to change the fucking subject in a goddamn hurry, is what matters.  “Y’know, I always… like, back in the day, I always used to look at that thing—” He points, for emphasis, just in case.  “And think how fun it’d be to just… jump in it.  I think this is the biggest one.”

“I think you’re right,” Roy says, and apparently the last-ditch effort worked, because the corner of his mouth is turning up again.

“Never got around to it,” Ed says.  He doesn’t add _Never got around to most of the things I used to daydream about; never got around to much of anything I liked the thought of_.  “I swear there was a police officer hanging out right next to it every single time.  It was like they _knew_.”

“Edward,” Roy says.

And that— _that_ —is like a warm tickle at the base of his fucking spine; the soundwaves shiver like an earthquake, and the ripples broaden into shudders underneath his skin—

Nobody should be able to wield that kind of power with a single fucking word.

Roy holds out his left hand, and his eyes keep gleaming in the streetlamp light.

“Come on,” he says.  “Let’s do it now.”

Ed stares at Roy’s hand, which is easier than looking at his eyes—but not by much.  It’s just—a nice hand; it’s nice-shaped; it’s all even and firm-looking, and you can tell just with a fucking glance that it’s strong as hell, but it’s soft, too; and the thick white scar bisecting the palm just makes it more trustworthy, somehow—

“What?” Ed manages, which is marginally better than _Good hands, Mustang.  Well-done there_.

“If you’ve always wanted to do it,” Roy says, “then let’s do it.  There’s no one around, and if anyone turns up, I will have them know that I am a decorated general of the Amestrian military, and I have prior authorization to be jumping in fountains.”

“Fuck,” Ed croaks out.  He dares to look up, and Roy’s just—grinning.  Grinning fit to shatter his own face; grinning like a kid who doesn’t know yet what it means to live in terror of the the whole damn world.  Grinning like the person Ed’s always wanted, and the one he’s always wanted to _be_.

And Roy Mustang is just so damn gorgeous with the moonlight and the lamplight and the sudden delight all warring on his face, and the air around them must’ve somehow purified itself into straight oxygen, because every time Ed drags in a breath, his head goes light.

“Okay,” he says.  “Okay, I—”

It’s a combination of an old habit that won’t ever die and the positions of their bodies: he puts his right hand into Roy’s, but Roy doesn’t really react as his fingers curl in around the gloved steel—just beams at Ed, insupfuckingpressible, and then starts to—

Pull.

And then they’re running, and the air stays still dizzyingly fucking sweet, and Roy starts laughing five strides before he even hops up onto the rim of the fountain; he releases Ed’s hand seconds before he leaps right in—

The splash of water alone feels fucking freezing, but Ed’s got so much momentum that his brain doesn’t kick in before his foot kicks up, and—

In he goes.

Shockingly enough—as in, shock to the system; and also as in, not-fucking-surprising-at-all—the water’s even colder when he’s in it up to his fucking knees.  On the one side, anyway.  The automail obviously isn’t too bothered by the cold—yet, that is; he’ll feel it later when the chill seeps into the stump and aches like a motherfucker all the way up to his hip—but Roy’s making such a damn ruckus that there’s water _everywhere_ , and it’s crawling up the fabric of his slacks.

And he knows he’ll regret it—sort of, kind of, one way or another; maybe just in a small way, but—

But he’s laughing.

And he’s wading through the tiny, slapping waves towards Roy.

And he can’t get himself to stop.

“What the hell are you doing?” he asks, like it matters at this point.

“Making your dream of negligibly minor civil disobedience come true,” Roy says, bending down to cup his hands in the water and then flinging it skyward—not that he needs to; there are jets pouring out on all sides of the bronze crag of rock that this douchebag general’s horse somehow found a stable perch on, despite the fact that horses hate this kind of shit.

More pertinently, where the fuck does Roy even _get_ words like that?

He’s right, though, weirdly enough.  This is basically what Ed had imagined—except that it was always Al he’d envisioned, obviously, instead of his fucking C.O.; but the giddiness and the frigid water and the shaking of the unending laughter in his chest… That’s all there.  That’s all lined up and checked off and fucking perfect; this is exactly what he thought it’d be.

How long has it been since something in his life went according to the fucking plan?

How long has it been since stupid, simple, kid-in-a-candy-store _glee_ just rose through him from the tips of both sets of toes like this?

Roy puts one hand under the spray of one of the spigots and then opens his palm—the better to bat a splash of it right at Ed’s face, but he’s not fucking with some amateur, and Ed ducks away and flings his arm over his face and maybe yelps aloud for effect, and—

“Come on,” Roy says, and then he’s sloshing around to the other side of the statue—he’s drenched; tiny little rivulets run down his face, and his hair is dripping, and his white shirt’s clinging to his collarbones, and he won’t stop fucking grinning like the whole world’s good.

That should be fucking illegal.  It is a fucking _crime_.

Roy makes a big point of swinging his feet as he walks, splashing as much as possible, and then he wedges one foot up on top of one of the pipes and starts clambering up the fake rock.

“Let’s see here,” he says, which is positively fucking ridiculous, because he’s already reaching for a handhold on the statue-officer’s accoutrements.

“What the hell are you doing _now_?” Ed asks, regardless of the fact that it’s fairly obvious at this point that what the hell Roy’s doing is climbing up the side of the statue and carefully levering himself up, the better to plant one foot on the front edge of the horse’s saddle and the other on its mane.  He clings to the bronze bridle for a second before he slowly lets go of it and carefully raises himself upright.

He looks so fucking pleased with himself that whatever else Ed was going to say disintegrates in his mouth and twists it into another smile in spite of him.

“The only thing better than negligibly minor civil disobedience,” Roy says, “is slightly less minor civil disobedience.”  The moment he’s steady, he hikes one foot up onto the top of the horse’s head and strikes a dramatic pose, fanning one hand over his eyes so that he can gaze histrionically into the fucking distance.  Then he pauses, and then he reaches down and holds a hand out again, like he’s not a good seven fucking feet up from the fountain at this point.  “The view’s impressive; you should come up.”

Ed sets his hands on his hips, pretending he doesn’t feel wet fabric squishing everywhere.  At least he can’t hear it over the loud ambient plashing of the fountain and shit.  “Exactly what’re you trying to imply, Mustang?”

Ed doesn’t know if he could refuse this man a fucking thing when he’s grinning like that.  It’s terrifying.  It’s terrifying, and it’s great, and he wishes more people got the privilege of this; he wishes more people knew who Roy _really_ is—

“Nothing whatsoever,” Roy says brightly, “except that you should join me in less-negligibly-minor civil disobedience and see this.”

Ed tries to glower at him, but it’s hard from this angle, and it’s even harder when the lightness of his heart is a gentle sort of airiness instead of a desperate flutter for the first time in what feels like a fucking age.

“This better be good,” he says.  It’s nice to recognize, now that he has the chance, that this stupid life hasn’t completely beaten that pure little child’s impulse to _climb things_ out of him yet.  He circles the statue to take it from the same side Roy did, then clasps his right hand around the draping bronze reins for leverage and kicks around for a foothold.

Roy’s extending a hand towards him for him to take with his left.

“I’m heavier than I look,” Ed says.  “Captain Hawkeye’ll _kill_ me if I drag you off this thing, and you crack your head open.”

“No, she wouldn’t,” Roy says.  “She’d know whose fault it was.  She learned a long time ago that the bad ideas are always mine.”  He hooks his elbow around the raised arm of the cavalry officer and reaches down farther with his empty hand.  “Trust me.”

 _Bastard_.

Ed takes his stupid fucking hand.

Even though they’re both soaking wet by now, Roy’s grip is so firm that Ed isn’t scared of falling for a second.

Probably that’s his first mistake.  A strong dose of cynicism is healthy, whatever anybody says—if you keep your hopes low, it’s that much harder to end up disappointed.

Roy hauls upward, and Ed leverages the spot where the edge of his boot fit in against some detailing on the horse’s saddle, and then there’s a scramble—and a wrenching, gut-droppingly horrifying moment where he thinks his momentum shifted Roy’s balance, because the automail is heavier than _anybody_ understands—and then he’s up, and he’s stable, and one of Roy’s hands grasps his shoulder, and one brushes his back, and then they both retreat once Ed’s found his footing.

“There you go,” Roy says, which is a bit redundant, but Ed can forgive that.  “See?”

Ed figures Roy’s indulged him enough over the years to oblige him with this, so he gives the panorama a real, long, thoughtful look.

And Roy wasn’t shitting him—there’s a first time for everything, evidently.  The height of the fountain on top of the hill elevates them just over the treeline, so the contours of the city are laid out before them on every side.  The lights look like stars, and the stars look like gems, and the edge of the sky’s deepened into violet.

“Damn,” Ed manages.  “Okay, you’re right.”

“May I have that in writing?” Roy asks.

Ed feels the grin pulling on his mouth and is powerless to stop it.  “Sure thing.  Over my dead body.”

Roy clutches his chest.  “You wound me, Edward.”

“Nah,” Ed says.  “But I will if you keep full-naming me like that.”

“It’s a wonderful name,” Roy says.  “And I’ll confess to having been the slightest bit jealous my whole life of people who have more than one syllable to work with.”

Ed eyes him for the thousandth time tonight, trying to figure out if he’s serious.  “It’s just a name.”

“On the contrary,” Roy says, “it is _your_ name.  I like to appreciate the entirety of it.”

Ed eyes him a little more for good measure.  “You realize how much time you’ve wasted speaking that extra sound over time?”

“It wasn’t wasted,” Roy says.  “It was cherished.  Besides which, you get so gloriously tongue-tied when I really savor it that I’m not about to stop.”  He pauses, and glances sideways, and smiles a bit.  “Unless it really does bother you, in which case—”

“Whatever, Mustang,” Ed says—pointedly, to make sure the bastard knows first that this road runs two ways, and second that he can probably get away with anything if he keeps on looking like _that_.

Roy’s faint smile gives away that he gets it.  That’s one of the things Ed likes so much about him—even when it spits in the face of his better judgment and shit.  He’s _smart_.  And he’s both book-smart and people-smart, like Al, which is something Ed’s come to rely on when it comes to communication and all of that crap.  He’s used to being understood—he takes it for granted, even, right up until he gets the blank stare from someone who’s unaccustomed to his brand of crazy—despite the fact that he’s an odd duck and he fucking knows it.  Al’s spoiled him rotten that way for as long as he can remember, and Roy’s sure as hell not helping.

“Well,” the master of melodrama says, sweeping one arm out in front of them.  “Behold my beloved city, or something like that.”

“Something like that,” Ed says.

He glances up and over, though, and there’s a softness to Roy’s eyes and the curve of his smile that has nothing to do with showiness or sarcasm.  Maybe he shouldn’t say anything—but then again, maybe it’s something that ought to be acknowledged whenever it’s safe.

“You really love this place, don’t you?” he asks.  “Deep down.  Under all the I-hate-paperwork-and-also-humanity shit.”

Roy takes a deep breath and sighs, but the faint smile doesn’t fade.

“You caught me,” he says.  “I can’t help it.”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  Every little light out there—every streetlamp, every front porch, every storefront and every window on an office or a home, every flashlight under the covers and every lantern in the night—is guiding someone through the dark.  “I know what you mean.”

“Thought you might,” Roy says.  He pauses, and then he glances around them.  “Now perhaps we should see if we can get down from here without breaking our necks.”

“You’re talking to the guy who does backflips off the diving board,” Ed says, curling a few of the metal fingers around the horse’s nearest ear, “don’t forget.”

“I hadn’t,” Roy says, and if he says anything else, it gets lost in the splashing as Ed swings down.

Obviously he doesn’t do a purely ornamental aerial somersault en route just for the sake of getting a glimpse of Roy’s amazement when he lands.  That would be seriously fucking ostentatious, of course.

Roy has a little more trouble, and there’s a heart-stopping second where Ed thinks he’s going to slip and break all his annoyingly nicely-shaped bones, and Hawkeye’s going to murder Ed and incinerate whatever’s left of Roy, but then the bastard makes it back down into the pool without any notable disasters.

“Right,” Roy says, so calmly you’d never know he was stepping back out of a fucking government-sanctioned fountain, dripping water and probably incomprehensible quantities of bacteria.  “Shall we see about that ice cream?”

“We can see it if you want,” Ed says, trying to shake a little bit of the squelchy wet out of his shoes, “but if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather eat it.”

Roy makes a face at him.  “Never thought I’d catch you quibbling about semantics.”

“Yeah, well,” Ed says.  “It’s probably your influence, so it’s your own damn fault.”

The face twists wistful.  “You’re… probably right.”

“Can I have that in writing?” Ed asks.

Roy smirks, and something deep down at the base of Ed’s stomach shudders hard and hot and _bright_.

  


* * *

  


“Shut up,” Ed says as he starts peeling bills out of his wallet.  He lays a napkin down on the counter and spreads the first piece of legal tender that he manages to extract down on it.

“I didn’t say anything,” Roy says.

“You’re snickering,” Ed says.  “Sound effects count under ‘shut up’.”

“They do not,” Roy says.

“Well, now you’re talking,” Ed says, flattening out another bill on his napkin bed.  “So shut up.”

The guy behind the counter doesn’t seem to have any idea what to do with either of them.

That makes… well, either two or three of them, depending on where Roy stands on this whole thing.

“It’s hardly my fault,” Roy says, “that you look ever-so-slightly ridiculous trying to dry out enough currency to buy ice cream with.”

“It is fucking completely your fault,” Ed says.  “ _You’re_ the one who wanted t—” Maybe he shouldn’t out Roy as a fountain-jumper in front of this cashier.  “It was your idea.”  He shakes one of the bills before he lays it out.  It makes this disgusting little _splat_ noise as its own momentum unfurls it on top of the napkins.  “You know how many pigeons shit in that water?”

“Thousands, I’m sure,” Roy says.  “And yet somehow we survived.”

“Um,” the guy behind the counter says, “what can I get you?”

“Two scoops of strawberry,” Ed says.  “In a cone, please.”  He glances at Roy.  “What do you want?”

“A vanilla milkshake,” Roy says, “if you don’t mind.  Small is fine.”

Ed eyes him.  Roy darts a glance back, and the corners of his mouth twitch—which, honestly, is almost as fucking bad as articulating the joke.

Bastard can mock him _silently_ now.  The fucking world might as well come to an end.

“Sure,” the cashier guy says.  “That’ll be eight hundred cens.”

“Really, I can—” Roy start.

“Nope,” Ed says.  Pointedly, after a sidelong glare for good measure, he sorts through his small pile of wet money and selects an appropriate bill.  He holds it out, and the guy behind the counter gingerly reaches out to accept it—probably Ed shouldn’t have said the thing about the pigeons, but too late now.

“Coming right up,” the guy says.

“Thank you,” Roy says for both of them while Ed undertakes the less-than-pleasant task of re-folding all of his wet money and trying to jam it back into his wet wallet.  Roy loiters a little ways down along the frosted window displaying all the flavors—just far enough to be companionable without hovering, which is fucking incredible; where do people _get_ instincts for shit like that?  How can Ed wrangle his way into a few?

“This was easier back when I just used the watch,” he says, because silence is weird or whatever.  Winry always says that.  Except if you try to talk to her while she’s working, at which point she’ll assault you.  “But I guess it’s probably good I didn’t throw _that_ in a fucking fountain.”

“They’re not especially difficult to replace,” Roy says.  “I may have told you a white lie about that to encourage you not to destroy yours.”

“That’s all right,” Ed says, struggling with the stupidly fucking impossible combination of damp glove, steel fingertips, and wet paper currency.  “I destroyed enough other shit to keep you busy.”

Roy grimaces, but you can tell he’s trying not to laugh.  “Rarely have I borne witness to a truer statement.”

Ed fumbles the last few bills into his wallet, shoves it into his pocket, and tries not to look too smug.

He succeeds at the first two things.

Roy saunters over to the little two-seat table in the corner by the cake display—which is a dangerous place to sit when you’re waiting for your dessert to be ready, but maybe people with duller sweet teeth than Ed don’t have to think about those sorts of things—and pulls out both of the chairs before Ed can get there and grab his own.  Ed gives him a warning look, which Roy pretends not to understand, and then sits down and folds his arms across his chest.  They’re both still pretty fucking wet, which should be way more annoying than it actually is.

Roy stretches his unreasonably long legs out away from his chair—one of them under the table, and Ed…

Ed is struck with some kind of ungodly, unholy, unthinkable inspiration, and he can’t even look—can’t even watch.  He stares intently at the wall and curls his fingers tightly into his own sleeves and gently, gently shifts and shuffles his right foot until the side of his calf is just barely brushing Roy’s.

Oh, fuck, he really just did that.  Oh, _fuck_ , he can’t take it back now.  Is that weird?  It’s weird, isn’t it?  Or—worse—it’s fucking childish.  It’s stupid, puerile teenager shit; it’s immature and sappy and dumb, and nobody with any experience or gravitas would even attempt to do something so fucking—

Roy’s foot shifts a little closer, so that their ankles press together.

Ed’s face is on fire.

What a fucking way to go.

“Here’s your two scoops of strawberry,” the guy behind the counter calls, and he’s holding out a cone, so he can’t just set it down or something—so Ed _has_ to jump up like he’s been fucking burned and practically run across the floor to go fetch it.  It’s just… courteous.  Obviously.

Roy is never even going to want to _talk_ to him again, let alone take him out for pomegranate-abused steaks.

“Thanks,” Ed says as he takes his stupid fucking ice cream cone.

“Milkshake’s going to be just another minute,” the guy says, and Ed assumes nodding is an appropriate response.  It also buys him a few more seconds before he has to turn around and try not to look at Roy while he trudges back to the table with his ice cream and sits down.

He peeks through his hair.  Roy looks—

Fucking… distressed?

But only for a fraction of a second before he wipes it all away again, like he always fucking does.

It couldn’t last, could it?  The niceness, the happy part—things being _good_ like this.

“Sorry,” Roy says, pitching his voice airily.  “I just realized I’m going to have to sit here and watch you lick that and try to keep my imagination as far from the gutter as possible.”

Back to face-combustion and a little bit of guts-churning that makes the ice cream look significantly less appetizing.

But the heat’s not just local to his cheeks and his throat and his ears, is the thing—because it’s in the knot in his stomach, too, and then it’s lower than that, and he thinks—

Maybe—

It wouldn’t be the worst thing—

For Roy to think about him like that.

Roy wouldn’t—be fucked up about it.  Roy wouldn’t think anything gross, or exploitative; Roy would… well, _probably_ Roy would treat it the same way he’s treated all of this.  Respectfully.  Like he really fucking cares, and that comes first.

Right?

Ed tries to level a look at him that’ll seem more sardonically suspicious than… fucking terrified.  Which is closer to the mark.

“If you start drooling on the table,” he says, “they’re probably gonna kick us out.”

Roy blinks rapidly twice—dead giveaway that he wasn’t expecting that, which seems kind of weird given that he _started_ it—and then makes a show of pretending to wipe at his mouth.  “Surely they can’t expel us from the premises before they’ve given me my—”

“Milkshake?” the guy at the counter says.

“Aha,” Roy says—apparently people _actually say that_ , or at least Roy does; whether he counts as a person is sometimes up for debate—and then he springs out of his chair and starts over to the counter.

Ed watches him, and tries to pay attention to the way he moves.  Isn’t that something people get… interested… in?  Movement, bodies, muscles, the ever-changing contours of the individual parts beneath somebody’s clothes.  That’s supposed to—trigger something.  Right?  Flip a switch?  Start a fire?  Spark some kind of lightning up and down his spine?

He likes the way Roy walks.  He likes the lines of Roy’s silhouette; he likes the stupid floof of Roy’s hair, even.

But that’s it.

He just—likes it.

There’s nothing fucking _magical_ about it.

It doesn’t make some kind of wretched-wonderful heat swell in the core of him and choke all of the air out of the room.

He’s always admired the way Roy’s easy confidence informs every single thing the bastard does.  That doesn’t add up in his head to wanting to strip Roy naked and lick him like an ice cream cone or whatever the fuck it is.

Fuck.  How do people _do_ this shit?

Ed’s trying to keep the baseline of his heartbeat at a strong patter instead of a wild race, but he knows he pitched a losing battle here; he knows he can’t control that shit, and his own body won’t grant him any goddamn quarter when it comes to panic—when it comes to this variety of visceral fucking fear.

But Roy just swaggers back with a glass in hand, settles in his chair again, crosses one leg over the other at the knee (were they always that—long?  Or is it the black slacks that makes them look it?  It’s the black, isn’t it?), and turns to Ed with a bizarrely sweet sort of version of the usual smirk.

“Go ahead,” he says.

If he’s talking about the ice cream… But he’s not looking at it—just at Ed’s eyes; at Ed’s face, like that’s the important part.

Ed has to wet his lips, because the surface of his stupid fucking tongue just turned to sand.  “Go ahead and what?”

“And tell me that this is the perfect dessert for me,” Roy says, and then he punctuates it with this _devastating_ fucking arch of one eyebrow, and tucks the little red-and-white-striped straw into the corner of his mouth; “because I suck.”

And Ed—

Snorts.

Which was not even remotely his fucking intention—which is _stupid as fuck_ , actually, but which—

Makes Roy laugh again, not too loud, but with that same fucking glimmer of pure contentment in his eye, and that—

Shakes the tension, shatters the ice, and breaks the spell that had been winding frigid fucking tendrils through Ed’s veins to freeze them solid.

With that hanging between them—the echo of the laughter, not the tight web of desperate, defensive boundary lines—they’re just two fucking idiots on a date again, enjoying each other’s stupid company.

That’s what Ed wants them to be.

  


* * *

  


Miraculously, Roy seems to be significantly less shit at getting out of parking spots than at getting into them.  It’s good for Ed’s blood pressure, probably, but it hamstrings his hopes of poking more fun at Roy’s driving, so that’s sort of a mixed bag.

Roy walks him up to the front of his and Al’s apartment complex with one hand sort of hovering behind his back the whole time—low, near the small of it, like he’s about to reach out and tap the curve of Ed’s spine any second.

Only he doesn’t.  Just sort of—drops his hand to his side every time Ed turns a little and almost sees it raised there.

Which is a good thing, most likely.  Ed can’t quite tell if he’s actually sweating, or if it’s just the shuddering rhythm of the nerves rattling under his skin combined with the still-wet clothes, but he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s supposed to do at this point—does he invite Roy inside?  Or just upstairs?  Al’s almost definitely home, which is… well, a good thing, because it means nothing weird _could_ happen even if Roy somehow mystically got the wrong idea of what Ed meant, but—does he expect that?  Does he want that?  Is the gesture important enough to follow through with?  Does it read as _Fuck you, you’re gross_ if you don’t at least offer, or—?

“Well,” Roy says when they reach the door to the lobby, and Ed stands there racking his fucking brain for every scrap of social etiquette logic rule shit that might apply.  “I hope that wasn’t too excruciating.”

“Funny,” Ed says.  “I thought up ’til now that you were pretty good with words.”

Roy looks at him.

Ed looks back.

“Beg pardon?” Roy says.

“It wasn’t fucking excruciating at all,” Ed says.  “It was _fun_.”  That part came out easy—the rest sticks, and he has to swallow a couple times.  “It was really—nice.  It was a lot… a lot nicer than I thought it’d be.  I—liked it.  So—thanks.”

Roy’s smile starts out small and surprised, and then it breaks open into a giant, beaming grin that is so freaking _lame_ —

And really—cute, too, but that’s beside the point.

He shifts, and then he parts both arms a little, and his eyebrows rise—

“May I hug you?” he asks.

He is so lame.  He is so, so, _so_ lame—

And Ed maybe kind of blinks at him for a second and then dives into that invitation before he can help himself—before there’s time to speak, or think, or second-guess, or wonder if anybody’s going to see.

And even though they’re both still extremely damp, and Roy smells a little bit like old moss and whatever sort of chemical thing they use to try to keep the fountain water clean, it’s just—

It’s fucking—

Great.

Roy’s chest is broad enough for Ed to press his cheek against, and his ear against Roy’s sternum lets the bastard’s heartbeat resonate right through both of them—and if it’s hard to tell if it speeds up in the first couple seconds after Ed slings both arms around his back.

Roy also smells a little bit like cologne—kind of sharp and just a sliver musky.  Ed’s gonna take a wild guess and assume it’s probably a fancy type, but whatever; he sort of likes it.  There’s not much of a chance to dwell on it, because Roy very gently lowers his head a little, and then he’s sort of—hiding his face in Ed’s hair, which is almost like—

Almost like pressing his lips against the top of Ed’s head.  Almost a kiss.  Almost something irrevocable.

And maybe, maybe, almost something good.

Al’s still the best hugger in Amestris, but he’s got some fucking competition here.  Roy holds Ed just tight enough that he doesn’t have a _choice_ but to feel safe—ensconced, enveloped, with every slow breath that fills Roy’s chest pressing them just a little bit closer.

“Thank you,” Roy says, “for tonight.  I haven’t enjoyed a night out nearly so much in a very long time.”

Roy’s arms squeeze in around him gently just once, and then they loosen, and if Ed keeps clinging to Roy’s still-wet clothes, it’ll get weird, so he lets go.

Or he tries to—the automail doesn’t seem to want to fucking quit, and the fingers of it stay curled in the lapel of Roy’s coat even as they draw apart.

Roy’s hand brushes the side of his ribcage, and then it pauses, and then it ghosts up his chest, and Roy’s fingertips tuck his hair back behind his ear.  They smooth their way around the curve of it, and Ed’s whole face fucking _tingles_ —

And then they sweep down along the side of his neck and graze over where—

Verso—

Fucking—

Poisoned him with teeth and fucking tongue.

And a too-hot, half-humiliated flush stings Ed’s cheeks, but in the rush of it, a thought flicks to the forefront of his brain.

He has the power to change that.

Not fix it.  Not erase it.  Not expunge it.

But at least—at the very fucking _least_ —to paper over it a little.  To offer himself a fucking alternative thought to hide in when he can’t run from that one anymore.

“Hey,” he says.  Somehow—by some fucking miracle of will and sightlines—he’s looking up into Roy’s stupid-gorgeous fucking eyes.  “Will you—”

He can fucking change it.  He can’t make it go away.  He can’t make it not have happened.  But he can make it _less_.

“Can you kiss me?” he asks.

Roy’s eyes widen, and his breath catches in his throat and then shudders back out slow.

He smiles, and the corners of his eyes crinkle up in that bowl-you-the-fuck-over way they do, and he lifts his hand and wraps it around Ed’s automail where it’s still fixed onto his shirt like a highly motivated insect.

A part of Ed wishes more than anything that he could feel that.

But a different part thinks it almost means more because he can’t.

Because Roy doesn’t care; because Roy doesn’t flinch away from cradling the insensible steel as gently as if it was fucking flesh and blood; because Roy—

“I am extremely confident,” Roy says, “that I _can_.  I think the question is whether I’d be able to stop before morning.”

“You’ve only got about another hour before I pass out standing up,” Ed says.  Constructing sentences is really fucking challenging with his pulse thundering through his ears like this.  “So I don’t think that’s gonna be a problem.”  He swallows.  “The problem…”

He swallows again.  And takes a breath.  And holds it.

And Roy fucking _waits_ for him—quiet and soft-eyed and fucking receptive.

“The problem,” he forces out, “is—I don’t—know how.”

Roy has fucking mastered the unassuming, nonjudgemental, reassuring smile thing.  It’s good that the brass doesn’t know that; they’d tear him the fuck apart.

“It’s actually rather difficult to do poorly,” he says.

“I’m good at difficult,” Ed says.

“You’re also good at good,” Roy says.  He pauses, and his gaze darts to Ed’s mouth before it rises to his eyes again, and that makes him—fucking—shiver.  In a nice way, he thinks, but it’s hard to tell; it’s hard to _know_ ; so many of his goddamn systems are going wild all at once.  “It’s… it gets glorified as something sacred, and people let it get complicated, but at the core it’s really very simple.”  His hand lifts, and he slides the pad of his thumb over Ed’s cheekbone, and there’s fucking static electricity coursing in its wake—sizzling along the path of it; the trajectory tingle-burns— “Really I think the only important part is… close your eyes and don’t clench your jaw.”

“Right now?” Ed asks, sounding faint and vaguely stupid even to his own ears—what he can hear of his voice through his fucking heartbeat, anyway.

“When I kiss you,” Roy says.

“When’s that gonna be?” Ed asks.

Roy laughs, and either Ed’s high on pomegranates and ice cream, or the man is fucking _magic_ , because somehow it doesn’t sound condescending.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Roy says.  He strokes Ed’s hair back again.  That seems like a weird fetish in the making.  “And whenever it looks like you’re not staring down a venomous snake and bracing yourself to get bitten.”

Fuck.

“I trust you,” Ed says, and maybe the words shake a little, or maybe that’s the whole fucking world.  “I do.  But it’s—this isn’t—it—”

“I wasn’t trying to criticize,” Roy says.  He seems to think that petting Ed’s hair is somehow going to stop Ed’s heart from banging right the fuck out of his chest.  It’s a nice idea, but Ed’s pretty sure those are entirely two different sets of nerves.  “I just don’t want you to go into this tensed up to hate it.”

“I’m not,” Ed says.  “This isn’t hate-tense; this is normal-tense.”

Roy looks at him.

He looks back.

“Relax,” Roy says.

“Oh, yes, sir,” Ed says.  “Right a-fucking-way, sir; I’ll just get on that.”

Roy’s eyes do the stupid crinkle thing _again_ , and Ed’s insides twist, and wobble, and warm.

“Point taken,” Roy says.

“Just do it,” Ed says.  “You know how it goes with me and the fucking deep end.”

“I do,” Roy says.  “Are you sure?”

Ed glares at him.

Roy grins again.  “I know, I know.  Just—humor me.”

Ed’s heart is in his throat, and his guts are a writhing mess, and his head keeps going all light and floaty like it’s trying to get away, because it knows some bad shit’s coming.

But Roy’s obnoxiously sweet little smile keeps grounding him, and he’s tethered by the soft, soft, unobtrusive, tingle-trailing warmth of Roy’s fingertips threaded just a little ways into his hair, palm resting gently in against his cheek.

He may pass out, or explode, but that’s not the question Roy asked.

And the answer to that one is—

“I’m sure,” he says.  “I mean it.”

“All right, then,” Roy says—voice just above a whisper.

“All fuckin’ right,” Ed grinds out.

“Breathe,” Roy says.

“Fucking kiss me,” Ed says.

Roy half-laughs.  “All _right_ , all right—all right.”  The pads of his thumbs graze down along Ed’s temples, and then both hands shift to cup his face on both sides, and that feels—good?  Foreign?  Terrifying?  Wonderful?  “Close your eyes.  Just for a second.”

Ed swallows.  His mouth is all fucking dry; his throat is worse—dry and sticky, chokingly arid and constricted all at once.  He fights in the deepest breath he can—the depth of which isn’t exactly worth writing home about—and looks up into Roy’s stupid, stupid, far-too-believable face.

The bastard’s going to charm the whole country with that stupid little smile.  They’ll never know what hit them.

Or maybe Roy won’t charm them with it, because he won’t ever share it.  Maybe this one—this specific one; this one in particular—is for Ed alone.

Ed drags another sliver of oxygen down through the wasteland behind his tongue, and he tilts his head back just a little and closes his eyes.

He feels fucking stupid for a second, standing there with his eyes shut, trying not to squeeze them tight enough to look like a kid playing hide-and-go-seek—or a kid playing hide-from-the-nightmares; hide-from-the-monsters; hide-from-the-truth.  Roy obviously hasn’t gone anywhere, since his hands are still laying against either side of Ed’s jaw, but—

It’s too bad they’re not out in the countryside, just this once.  There’d be actual crickets chirping in the sil—

A mouth— _Roy Mustang’s_ fucking mouth—presses over his.

His first semi-conscious conclusion is just that it’s—warm.  Sort of strange.  But any sort of physical contact made fumbling around with your eyes closed probably would be, and it’s not _bad_ -strange; just… odd.  Not nearly as fucking mystical as anybody made it out to be; his heart’s still beating fit to fucking burst, and the adrenaline coursing through him would be liable to kill a less habitually-reckless human being, but—

Roy parts his lips just slightly, and then there’s a give to it, and a slickness; their mouths don’t just _shift_ together; they sort of—glide, but there’s still a little friction; and intermittently they fit perfectly before Roy changes the angle of it, and his mouth draws back and forth over Ed’s again.

It’s aimless and a little weird and not as wet as he’d sort of expected.  And—nice.  Close.  Undeniably fucking intimate and more than a touch surreal.

Roy’s kissing him.  Roy’s hands are cradling his face; they’re breathing in the same damn air—each other’s air, probably; that must be why his head’s gone light.  It has to do with the unwarranted recycling of gaseous molecules, not the way Roy’s fingertips trace through the wispy hairs just behind his ear while Roy’s mouth caresses his, and the darkness makes it just that much more _imminent_ —just that much more intense—

All he has, in this moment, is his heartbeat and the mingling heat of their bodies and the rasp of his breath and the impossible soft-weight of Roy’s mouth.

And it’s good.

It’s _good_.

It doesn’t even really make sense—mashing your mouth against another person’s shouldn’t have an emotional impact; there’s something terribly fucking wrong with the whole of humanity, probably.  They’ve assigned so much meaning to this lip-meeting business that they’re all brainwashed; it’s ingrained in the whole species’ collective psyche that kissing someone should feel pleasurable and a little bit thrilling.

And it fucking _does_.

Ed hesitates and then tries to open his mouth just a fraction like Roy did—and it gets a little wetter at that point, as their mouths slide against each other, and sparks fly in his tormented brain as he tastes the inside of Roy’s lip.  That’s just—incredibly fucking personal; practically _forbidden_ ; that’s so far beyond the pale of platonic that it just fucking blows Ed’s mind a little bit—

And there’s just a touch of lingering sweetness from the milkshake, and that explodes the last little bastion of reason inside his spinning skull.

He hasn’t yet determined whether he’s stayed on the same planet or filtered through into a different universe by the time the heat of Roy’s mouth over his unseals and draws away.  Part of him’s not sure he wants to open his eyes—what the fuck might Roy be thinking?  That can’t have been any good for _him_ , can it?—but instinct overpowers him, and he blinks until the weak light resolves into shadows, and the door beside him, and Roy.

Roy looks a little bit startled, and a lot fucking pleased.

Maybe Ed didn’t suck too much after all.

“Well, then,” Roy says, ever-so-slightly—too fast.  Too faint.  Almost—breathlessly.  “How was that?”

Ed swallows several of the things he could say, and also a nettly ball of nerves.  “You know all those rumors about you in the secretarial pool and shit?”

“No,” Roy says, starting to grin, the bastard.  “Sounds salacious.  Are they any good?”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “Fucking legendary.”  He tries really hard to glare, but he’s not sure it’s working.  “And they don’t do you justice.”

Roy’s eyes glimmer.

And then he’s leaning in, and then he’s kissing Ed again, and it’s only natural to let his eyes slip shut—and this one’s deeper, harder, _hotter_ —it resonates through him, trills down his back like tapping a xylophone hammer on the sections of his spine—sharp, sweet, impeccably precise—

And he shivers, and it’s all his stupid body’s stupid instincts—nothing to do with him; nothing anyone can prove—

Maybe he pushes himself up on his tiptoes just a bit to get a little more.

Roy draws back, and his breath is definitely coming fast this time, and that’s—Ed’s fault.  Ed’s doing.  Ed _did_ that, _caused_ that, _made_ him feel that way.  Just by existing.  Well—existing and offering his mouth and shit.

That is fucking heady as all hell.

So is the heretofore unthinkable cast of pink in Roy’s cheeks.

This can’t possibly be happening, can it?  Any of it.

“You’re blushing,” Ed’s voice says, because apparently stating the obvious is part of this date gig now.

“Preposterous,” Roy says, and the rosy dusting along his cheekbones darkens, apparently just to spite him.  “I’m not even capable.”

Ed shouldn’t; he shouldn’t fucking _dare_ —

He reaches up, slowly, giving Roy ample opportunity to pull away, and touches the fingertips of his left hand to Roy’s traitor cheek.

“Uh huh,” he says.

“It’s just the cold,” Roy says, grinning broadly, and feeling the muscles in his face stretch is—weird.  Wonderful.  A swirl of both.  “In fact, you know—” Roy’s hand rises—just as cautiously as Ed’s did, maybe more—and lays it over Ed’s.  It’s fucking bizarre how well they fit together, how well Roy’s fingers wrap around and over his, how _warm_ that is even when they’re still standing out here like a pair of morons in the dark.  “After the little jaunt we had in all that water—”

“Your idea,” Ed says.

“Conceded without contest,” Roy says, squeezing his hand and then releasing it so he can lower it again.  “But if I catch cold and tragically have to stay home Monday, I will leave Captain Hawkeye to an unconquerable pile of paperwork, and I’m not sure I will live to see Tuesday night.”

Ed is ninety percent sure Roy just said he should probably go now, but he errs on the side of noncommittal banter just to be safe.  “Yeah, I can think of funner ways to die.  Lots of them.”

“Billions,” Roy says.  “A vast universe of much more enjoyable invitations to self-destruction.”

Ed blinks at him.

“I’m worse when I’m nervous,” Roy says.  “They just come out like that.”

“You’re blushing again,” Ed says.

“I am not,” Roy says.

“Liar,” Ed says.  He gestures stupidly towards the door.  “So… yeah.  Guess this is g’night.”

“I guess so,” Roy says softly, and if he doesn’t stop smiling soon, he’s going to strain something.  “Goodnight, Edward.”  What a bastard.  “Thank you.”

“For _what_?” Ed says.  “You paid for all the expensive stuff.”

“For giving it a chance,” Roy says.  “For giving me a chance.”

Ed…

Has the guts to do this.  He _does_.  And he’s going to summon them or die trying.

“I’m not sure one chance was enough to gather data,” he says.  “So—y’know.  Maybe we should—do this again sometime.”

Roy is seriously going to hurt his face, and that is going to be a fucking shame.

“Ah, yes,” he says.  “For data.”

“Right,” Ed says.

“I think that’s a fine idea,” Roy says.

There’s a chance Ed’ll be in the hospital right next to him with a pulled cheek muscle or some shit.  “Okay.  Cool.”

“Excellent,” Roy says.  “Goodnight, Ed.”

“G’night,” Ed says again.  This is worse than trying to hang up the phone with Al.  “Drive safe.  If that’s even possible.”

Roy mimes a sword through the heart and then directs his pantomime stagger into a regular saunter back down the path.  He pauses at the sidewalk to wave.

Ed waves back.

This is so fucking stupid.

He feels like he just topped a mountain nobody’s ever seen the peak of before.

That wild, heart-pounding, adrenalized elation buoys him all the way back up to his and Al’s door.

His keys don’t seem to want to lie still in his fucking palm long enough for him to sort through them—why the hell does he have so many?  They’re clinking like mad against the automail even with the damp-ass glove still stretched out in between; he’s jittery enough without adding in weird auditory stimuli—

Shitfuck _damn_ , he’s got to get a grip.  He’s the Fullmetal fucking Alchemist.  He can handle _keys_.  All he has to do is stop thinking about the awful-wonderful flash of Roy’s grin in the stupid moonlight for two fucking seconds, and he’ll be fine.

He takes a deep breath—he’s long since lost count of how many of those this night required, but at least his lungs still seem to be working, and the motion alone still seems to carry some weight.  It steadies him enough that he can finally get his fucking fingers around the base of the apartment key, and then he fits it into the lock, and turns it, and—

“Brother!” Al calls from the living room—and then there’s a scuffing sound, followed by three footsteps, a squeak, and a colossal _thump_.

“Al!” Ed says, scrambling towards the source of it so fast his still-wet boot treads squeal shrilly on the hardwood.  “Are you—”

“Fine!” Al says, leaping to his feet right as Ed swings around the corner.  “I’m fine!”  He attempts to dust himself off while intently searching Ed’s face.  “How was it?”

“You sure you’re okay?” Ed says, pausing with his left arm half-outstretched.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Al says, faking a casual lean against the wall to demonstrate how okay he is.  “How _was_ it?”

Ed takes a breath.

And tries not to smile too hard.

And manages, “It was—good.  Really good.  I was—I mean, I wasn’t expecting that.”

Al’s smile goes a little lopsided.  “You usually don’t expect good things, Brother.”  Then it tilts back to rights, and it widens, and it gets blinding.  “Oh, my gosh.  He kissed you, didn’t he?”

Ed’s face ignites.  “Why the hell would you think—that?”

“Because you look like there’s something you want to tell me,” Al says, “and also something you really don’t want me to have to hear.”

Ed gives his face up for lost.  Maybe ash is in this season.  Not that he’s ever given a flying, swimming, or ambulatory fuck what’s in during any season, but hey.  “Well—jeez, Al.”

“Jeez yourself,” Al says delightedly.  In another second he’s going to clasp his hands underneath his chin; Ed _knows_ him.  “How was it?  Was it okay?”

The ash left over is going to catch fire, at this rate.  “I, uh—yeah.  It was—yeah.”

Al’s eyes light up so brightly that Ed almost doesn’t mind surrendering his face and possibly the rest of his body to the cataclysmic blaze.  And then—unsurprisingly—Al is flinging both arms around him and hugging him tightly, and that makes up for just about everything the world’s ever done wrong.

“I’m so happy for you, Brother!” Al says.  “That’s so wonderful, and he’s so wonderful, and I don’t have to murder him, and _you_ look happy for the first time in—gosh, I don’t know, a while, heck—and…”  He pauses in squeezing the life out of Ed long enough to pat Ed’s back a little.  Then he pats Ed’s shoulders, and then he draws back to pat Ed’s chest.  “…and why are you all wet?”

“Long story,” Ed says.

“Well, why don’t you put on some dry clothes,” Al says, “and I’ll put on some tea, and you can sit your butt down and tell me all about it.”  His face falls suddenly—instantly replaced by an expression so stricken that Ed instinctively grabs onto his arm.  “I mean—if you want to.  You don’t have to, obviously.  If it’s private, or you just would rather n—”

“Put the water on,” Ed says.  “You got anything that’ll stop me from being so fucking wired, so I can actually sleep tonight?”

The grin returns, immense and triumphant, like a focused sunbeam.  “ _Do_ I.  What do you think I am, Brother, some kind of tea amateur?”

“I think you’re a nerd,” Ed says, fake-punching his arm and then stepping past him to start down the hall.  “Which is exactly how I like you.”

“Just for that,” Al says, “I expect all the gory details.”

Ed’s heart’s still tripping over itself, and he can’t be sure that all the violent blushing hasn’t done any permanent damage to his blood vessels, and there’s still a shitty little sting of reminiscence low on his neck where Verso touched him first.

But his cheeks kind of ache from all the smiling, and Al’s humming while he clangs around with the kettle, and Roy never once asked too much or pushed too far.  He hadn’t really dared to hope for that.

Maybe the balance is shifting at long, long fucking last.

Maybe it’s safe now to daydream about feeling _all right_.

And maybe’s a hell of a lot better than nothing.


End file.
